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ENGLAND 



Political and Social. 



BY 

AUGUSTS LAUGEL. 

Pbivate Secret aet to the Due D'AtTMAu:. 

Author of " Studies in Science," " The United States during 
the War of 1861-65," &^c., &^c. 



TRANSLATED BY 

Prof. JAMES MORGAN HART. 




K 




NEW YORK: ^ 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, 

FOURTH AVENUE AND TWENTY-THIRD STREET. 

I 874-. 



Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1874, by 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, 
in_theOffice of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



5 






-_ ■ Lange, Littlb & Co., 

Nenvburgh Stereotype Co. printers, 

108 TO 114 WoosTKR Strkbt, N. Y. 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 



THE author, M. Laugel, has sent his book into the 
world unheralded. I should gladly do the same 
with the translation, but for the feeling that it may- 
be wise to preface a few words in self-defence. 

Translation, as a literary labor, is always more or less 
ungrateful. The errors that one commits are sure to be de- 
tected, while passages correctly rendered are passed over 
unheeded by the reader and the critic. This is the way 
of the world, and I am not disposed to quarrel with it. I 
content myself with calling the attention of reader and 
critic to one circumstance, generally overlooked. Books 
may be roughly divided into two classes : statements of 
fact, and statements of fiction, belief, sentiment, or im- 
pressions. The latter class will include all works in 
which style is an essential and pervading element, in 
which the author makes us feel throughout his individuality. 
It is precisely these works that give the translator most 
trouble. As long as statements of abstract or scientific 
truth merely are in question, any rendering will do that re- 
produces the meaning clearly and completely. But where 
the original is a work to which Bufibn's aphorism must be 
applied : the style is the man, the translator finds himself 
in a perpetual dilemma. He is called upon to choose 
between forcing his own language into unwonted channels 
of expression and sacrificing somewhat of the spirit and 
grace of the original. 

It is easy to recognize the class to which the present 
work belongs ; few writers on political subjects have so 
strongly marked, so individualized a style as M. Laugel. 
What he tells us is not new; the facts of English political 
history, the phases of religious belief, the social move- 
ments past and present will be familiar to the reader of 
average information. The novelty of the work consists in 



IV TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 

the way in which the author approaches us, the way in 
which he combines and applies his statements, the per- 
vading spirit of intelligent, unprejudiced, yet impassioned 
inquiry ; above all, the lion-like boldness of his utterance. 
There are passages without number, where every phrase 
is an epigram, sharp as an arrow and strong as a thunder- 
bolt. I take the liberty of citing one in the original : — 

" L' histoire des colonies a ete rarement ecrite, et n' a 
jamais ete lue. Nos societes hautaines, pharisaiques, 
fieres de leur pretendue moralite, nourries de belles max- 
imes et de mots trompeurs, ferment volontairement les 
yeux sur ces luttes obscures ou I'homme civilise redevient 
voleur, pirate, animal de proie. Les combats entre les 
peuples Chretiens sont regies par certaines conventions et 
enterpris au nom d'interets eleves ; la force prend la peine 
de se couvrir du masque du droit. Elle veut faire croire 
qu' elle est la protection du faible, de Topprime, qu' elle 
repare les erreurs seculaires, qu' elle est Tarme souveraine 
de la justice. Meme quand elle opprime, elle cherche a 
convaincre ; elle voudrait faire violence aux ames en 
meme temps qu' aux corps. 

" En face des race que nous nommons inferieures, ces 
scrupules s' evanouissent ; il semble que la force n' ait plus 
besoin alors de justification. Bien des vaincus la subis- 
sent, comme un fleau divin, comme quelque chose 
d' incomprehensible et de necessaire. Certaines races com- 
mencent a se fletrir sitot qu' elles ne savent plus vaincre ; 
elles abdiquent, se livrent, trop heureuses de desarmer la 
colere d'un maitre et d'obtenir ses faveurs." (Page 285 
of the translation). 

England has produced one essayist brilliant by emi- 
nence : Macaulay, and two of Macaulay's most brilliant 
essays, those on Clive and Warren Hastings^ treat of 
England's colonial policy in the East ; but we shall look 
in vain in Macaulay for a passage equaling the above in 
pithiness, pungency, merciless probing after the truth. 
We must go back to Tacitus. 

In face of such a style, my duty as translator seemed 
plainly marked out. I considered myself under obligation 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 



to reproduce the original with more than common literal- 
ness, to tax the resources of the English language, and 
even to transgress here and there the normal limits of 
English style, in the hope of making the reader feel the 
full power of the author. I did not consider it my duty 
to quench M. Laugel's fire in the " lymph " of the London 
Times or the Athenceum. 

The reader will find passages, then, that may strike 
him as odd. In most instances, the fault will have to rest 
with the translator. In some instances, however, the 
author himself must come in for a share of the blame. 
M. Laugel never writes obscurely, but he sometimes over- 
taxes the resources of his own language, in his anxiety to 
write forcibly. We see that he has had to struggle for the 
power of expression. In all such cases, 1 have tried to 
give the original just as it stands, for better or for worse. 
It is sloth in a translator not to make at least the earnest 
and persistent effort to reproduce the author ; but to 
attempt to improve u])on the author is impertinence. 

Some of the quotations made by the author from 
English w^orks I have succeeded in giving in the original 
form ; the others, where the work was either not cited or 
not accessible, I have been obliged to retranslate from the 
French. The reader will detect the difference by the 
presence or absence of quotation marks. 

It does not come within my province, as translator, to 
offer any criticisms upon the merits of the author. M. 
Laugel can speak better for himself. He has passed 
many years in England, as private secretary of the Due 
d'Aumale, and is thoroughly familiar with the language, 
literature, society, and institutions of that country. He is 
personally well known to many Englishmen and Ameri- 
cans. Every page of his essay bears witness to his ability 
to penetrate to the very essence of English life, to catch 
and portray the fundamental features of English character, 
to sympathize with the hidden springs of national action. 
The entire work is conceived in a spirit of Justesse, free 
alike from blind adulation and flippant prejudice ; M. 
Laugel holds the happy mean between Voltaire and 
Heinrich Heine. 

But there is on.e criticism that forced itself upon my 



Vi TRA NSLA TOR' S PRE FA CE. 

attention while at work upon the earlier chapters. M. 
Laugel is fond of reverting to the Anglo-Saxons as barba- 
rians. All that is coarse, chaotic, insurgent in the 
English character is explained on the theory of Anglo- 
Saxon atavism. No student of history will deny, of 
course, that the Anglo-Saxons were at one time barbarians. 
But when conquered by the Normans, they had been 
settled in England for six centuries. What remains we 
have of their literature and laws lead us to judge that in 
the eleventh century they had reached a high degree of 
civilization, in fact, a higher degree than that reached by 
any other European nation. Were we able to see both 
Anglo-Saxons and Normans as they actually confronted 
one another in 1066, we should probably give the prefer- 
ence to the former. What ensured the conquest of William 
was the circumstance that England, having long been a 
reasonably centralized country, far more so than France 
of those days, could be held by any one who seized upon 
the central power. If we run through the history of the 
last fourteen centuries^ we shall find that in every depart- 
ment, excepting pure art, England has led the van by a 
generation, or a century, or several centuries. Certain it 
is that a people capable of producing a poem like Beovulf, 
poets like Caedmon and Cynevulf, church-reformers like 
Aelfric, law-givers like Aelfred, should not be called bar- 
barians. Measured by our standards, they were doubtless 
coarse and imperfect in many respects, but they were not 
barbarian ; they had made very decided and rapid pro- 
gress in civilization. The more we learn of the character 
and institutions of our Anglo-Saxon progenitors, the 
greater becomes our respect for their sturdy good sense, 
their kindliness, their domestic virtues. The chasm that 
separates the Texan colonist from the Comanche brave is 
not much wider than the chasm between the Jutes, Angles, 
and Saxons of the fifth and the Anglo-Saxons of the 
eleventh century. What M. Laugel characterizes as 
Anglo-Saxon barbarism is simply the outburst of those 
elemental forces that underlie all civilization. Turn where 
we will, to France, Germany, Italy, to the Roman or the 
Greek empires, to the Egyptian, we shall always find the 
mob, let loose, acting after the same demoniacal fashion. 



T RAN SLA TOR'S PRE FA CE. vi l 

Barbarism is something different ; barbarians are neither 
communists nor insurgents, but a^rgressors following lead- 
ers and obeying laws of their own ; there are no stricter 
observers of law than men whom we call barbarians. 
Their law may not be our law, their ways may not be our 
ways ; but barbarism is still a mode of living, and com- 
munism, as a phase of insurrection, is the overthrow of 
every mode of living. 

These remarks must not be understood as in any way 
derogatory from M. Laugel's standing as a historian. 
The closest familiarity with his work has not bred con- 
tempt, but rather a genuine and hearty admiration for his 
remarkable powers of investigation and expression. To 
use a homely phrase, M. Laugel always hits the nail on 
the head. 

J. M. H. 
New York, March 1874. 



CONTENTS 



-♦- 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

0?i the Characteristics of the English Race. . . 9 

CHAPTER H. 
The Characteristics of English Protestantism, . . 43 

CHAPTER HI. 
The Eftglish Aristocracy^ its Origin and Character. . 86 

CHAPTER IV. 
The House of Commons and Parliamoitary Govern- 

me?tt. 140 

CHAPTER V. 
On the For?nation of Political Habits. . . .200 

CHAPTER VI. 
The People and Social Questions. .... 246 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Colonial Policy 284 



ENGLAND 
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL 



CHAPTER I. 

On the Characteristics of the English Race. 

GREAT nations are bred by the crossing of races ; 
they resemble those beautiful bronzes into the 
composition of which enter many metals. England 
was never anything to Rome but a despised and 
precarious conquest. It was not latinized like Gaul. 
The Scandinavian pirates, coming in small bands, 
established themselves more firmly. Nevertheless the 
Saxons, Jutes, Angles had no small trouble in making 
their way. For four centuries the two races, the Celtic 
and the Teutonic, the aborigines and the conquerors, 
jostled each other, drove each other back, waged des- 
perate war upon each other. History has left these 
ferocious struggles to the gloom of night. After in- 
vasion came invasion ; after the Saxons, the Normans 
(Norsemen) or Danes. Here fusion was easy ; for there 
was community of origin, analogy of speech, the same 



lO ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

barbarism. Amid these perpetual conflicts grew up the 
race that was to become one day the English. The blood 
of the Celts passed into that of the Teutons, the poetic 
figure of Arthur stands for the dim Celtic past. His 
name and fame finally emigrate to the Brittany of France, 
for the conquerors had succeeded in suppressing them at 
home, and the remembrance of him returns to England 
only with the Normans of the Conquest. Teutonic and 
Scandinavian ferocity had worn out Celtic suavity and 
lightness, and had effaced the last vestiges of Rome. 
Latin was banished to the cloisters; the language that 
was then forming rejected Latin roots. The names of 
cities and towns are to this day almost all Saxon. 
Though centuries have elapsed, England always exults 
in secret at a victory of the Germanic spirit over the Celtic 
or over the Latin. 

The substance of its character has remained Ger- 
manic. From the Teutonic womb proceed its slowness, 
its patience, its coolness, its headstrong courage. This 
origin will explain the submissiveness of so many unemo- 
tional, dull, commonplace lives, lives that never soar 
above the dust and are void of hope, will explain this self- 
tormenting rage not for what is perfect but for what is 
better, this spirit of observation in social and political 
science, this religion that calls for reasons and is dissatis- 
fied with the past while remaining a slave to its forms. 
As to the courage, this has a twofold origin. Tor, on that 
point, the Celts are the equals of the Teutons; but appa- 
rently it has preserved more of Germanic brutality than of 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. n 

the wanton boldness of the Britons. And yet it still has 
about it a certain cheerful contempt of death and a cer- 
tain intoxication in the presence of danger that are truly 
Briton. Hear what Comines says on the point : 

■ He could not leave them out of his sight for a whole 
season, helping them to drill, and camp, and learn the 
things necessary in our wars here. For there are none so 
stupid, so awkward as they, when they go to war for the 
first time. But in a very little while they are excellent 
soldiers, sensible and daring." And Froissart: "They 
are the most daring people in the world, the most out- 
rageous (i.e., far-going) and daring.' 

The courage and ferocity of the race are conspicuous 
in the useless wars of the Roses. Benvenuto Cellini 
speaks of the 'wild English beasts.' In the Middle 
Ages every man is a soldier. The great statute of West- 
minster (Edw. I.) obliges every Englishman to keep him- 
self in military equipments. Archery practice is compul- 
sory ; bows and arrows are put into the hands of children 
of seven ; every village has to keep a pair of targets. It 
is forbidden to practice at a shorter range than two hun- 
dred yards. Beneath a rainy sky, in an atmosphere 
always charged with moisture, violent exercise becomes a 
physical necessity. The sluggish, drooping muscles are 
roused by contest and danger. Surgeons admit that 
operations upon Englishmen are much less dangerous 
than upon Frenchmen ; the nervous system is under the 
domination of the vascular. These powerful bodies, 
white and soft in texture, are reservoirs of hidden 



12 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Strength. The indomitable courage of the British, says 
Macaulay, is never firmer and more obstinate than 
towards the close of a bloody and doubtful day. They 
delight in fighting, violence and force. There is a sort 
of Scandinavian ferocity in the invectives of the Puritan 
ministers : Beat your ploughshares into swords to fight the 
good fight of the Lord. Cursed be he who turns aside his 
sword. Better to see a whole people wallowing in gore 
than to embrace idolatry and superstition. (Southey, 
Book of the Church.) 

The quality most prized in a man is a well-nigh brutal 
virility. Young men seek after strength and look down 
upon grace. The Englishman of the schools and the uni- 
versities is an athlete ; he rows, wrestles, trains himself in 
a thousand ways. He seeks out rain, cold, wind, the sea, 
every sort of fatigue and danger. The women are virile. 
They row, they join the men in the chase through ploughed 
fields and over great hedges, walls, and ditches. The most 
perfect beauty has something savage about her, something 
a trifle awkward and shy. She suggests Diana rather than 
Venus. 

Robert Walpole's father said to him one day at Nor- 
folk Manor, after the cloth had been removed : * Come, 
Robert, you must drink twice to my once. It will never 
do to have a sober son witness his father's drunkenness.' 
For a long while the five-bottle men, those who could swal- 
low five bottles of wine without losing their senses, were 
the objects of admiration. Fox, after losing two thousand 
guineas at the club, washes his face and hurries to Parlia- 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 13 

ment to make a speech on the Thirty-Nine Articles. — 
{^Recollections of the Life of Fox,") 

The Saxon conquest did not crush out all the germs 
perpetuated in the race whose remains we find in Ireland, 
Wales and the Scotch Highlands, a race immeasurably 
strange, dreamy, quick to take impressions, abounding in 
elan and wanting in persistency, sentimental and religious. 
Outliving the centuries, the Celtic element still crops out 
above heavy Saxon Teutonism ; we seem to see a touch of 
it in English hiunor^ the universal fondness for gaming and 
betting, this grain of folly amid so much wisdom. The 
ancient spirit obtrudes itself like a feeling of remorse or a 
mockery. It raises the Englishman by fits and starts 
above the even horizon of his life, makes him blush for 
what he is most fond of, gives to assurance the air of 
being ill at ease, to pride the mask of timidity. Religion, 
striving to extricate itself from superstition and childish- 
ness, always finds itself led back to them. 

What has not been written about Shakespeare ! Ger- 
man professors are ready to claim him as a Teuton, and 
his dramas are put upon all the stages of Germany. They 
almost go so far as to say, over the Rhine, that Shake- 
speare is better understood at Munich, Dresden, Berlin, 
than at London. But can we not recognize Celtic genius 
in Shakespeare's unbridled imagination, his strangeness, 
his fancy, as well as in a certain acuteness, clearness, and 
nimbleness of his that are not in the least Teutonic ? 
Atavism is always at work reproducing ancient traits in 
human families. We encounter the Celtic thread in the 



14 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



poetry of Shelly, the scion of an ancient English family. 
By nature rebellious, almost perverse, never bending to 
social laws or realities, Shelly lived as in a dream, ignor- 
ing and despising man, constructing a new human nature 
from the collective but exaggerated and disproportionate 
features of the real. Is there not like madness in the 
extravagant landscape of a Turner, who plays with the sea, 
the mountains, the plains, with the clouds and the light, 
as though he were a second creator ? What strange and 
troubled lives, those of the poets Savage, Collins, Chat- 
terton ! This love of the unknown and the impossible, this 
secret derangement that marks the poet, are to be met with 
in private life. The wisest and the gravest have a secret 
taste for the extraordinary and the monstrous. They are 
not ready to eat the forbidden fruit, but they like to see 
and touch it, to inhale its odor. They have need of excite- 
ment, food for their imagination. . These minds that are 
so poised, so cold in their outward show, so regulated, are 
almost always troubled in secret. Beneath Teutonic 
sluggishness bubbles and surges, as it were, the lava of 
impatience. Daily toil, a regard for propriety, the tyranni- 
cal rule of the world, cover up and often suppress this 
inner soul, so to speak. But often it betrays itself to us 
through all the measured calmness of speech and lying 
coldness of action. At times it breaks through and 
escapes like an ignis fatuus. Young men surfeited with 
pleasure, wealth, fictitious greatness, sink their name, cast 
themselves into the gulf of toiling and suffering humanity, 
turn into workmen, sailors. Noblemen seek out the rabble : 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 



15 



rich men, poverty. Virtue is drawn towards vice, yes, 
sliamelessness. The privileged classes, the gods of the 
Olympus of aristocracy, take up with revolutionary rovers, 
adventurers, political bandits. Morbid curiosity urges 
the greatest, — shall we say, the purest? — to the prison, 
the fetid hospital, the scaffold, the foot of the gallows, 
wherever there are tears, sighs, blood, gnashing of teeth, 
to the slave-market, into the harem, to the Mormons, to 
the petty and obscure sects of all lands. 

This insubordination of soul is often associated with 
regularity and even austerity of conduct. Ennui, super- 
fluity of wealth, the torpor of a well-regulated society, a de- 
pressing climate, are insufhcient to account for this dash 
of the insatiable, the eccentric (the word, I believe, is of 
English origin), the morbid, which we find beneath the 
surface. The history of the nation, taken as a whole, is 
a sort of lofty defiance to mankind, to nature, to all the 
forces of earth. 

The Norman imprint is more evident but less pro- 
found. When the Normans conquered England, they 
were no longer the pirates of the North. They had 
already received the strong impress of Latin civilization. 
They brought with them into Great Britain patrician pride, 
the sense of politics, a taste for domination and ostenta- 
tion, their own eager and positive spirit, the genius of 
oratory, quite different from the genius of poetry. 
They also gave to it its grand architecture. But in 
England, as in Sicily, Norman art, greatened for a mo 
ment by the pride of conquest, soon exhausted itself, like 



1 6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

an exotic plant that dies after yielding magnificent 
flowers. 

The Normans were in the minority. But they were 
and continued to be the masters. Hence the Norman 
stamp shows itself more in politics than in manners, 
literature, national character. The instincts of the aristoc- 
racy were for a long time different from those of the peo- 
ple. Norman blood has mingled only slowly and drop by 
drop with the Celtic and the Saxon. The ruling race, 
greedy after gain, prosaic, suspicious, quarrelsome, fond 
of force, clever without being crafty, wanting in finesse 
but not in clear-sightedness, has guided, so to speak, the 
fortunes of the country. It has looked upon England as 
its prey, and the world at large as the prey of England. 
It has never known any sentimental politics ; it has 
fought for interests, not for ideas. Inspired by a sturdy 
faith in its own excellence, it has never regarded its allies 
as other than its tools ; it has despised its friends as 
much as its enemies. Its egoism, by turns daring or pa- 
tient, never letting itself be turned aside, knowing neither 
weakness nor remorse, has supplied the place of virtue. 
The brutality of the pirate has become, in the course of 
centuries, the wisdom of the statesman. 

We feel touched in spite of ourselves by this sturdy 
faith of a patrician race in its own greatness and its des- 
tiny. ' Who shall dare to say,' said Cobbett, sighing in 
America for his countr}', ' that an Englishman must not de- 
spise all the nations of the earth ? For my part I do, and 
with all my heart.' What intense pride in the words 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. ly 

with which Canning announced to parliament that he had 
recognized the Spanish Colonies : ' If France occupied 
Spain, was it necessary, in order to avoid the consequen- 
ces of that occupation, that we should blockade Cadiz ? 
No, I looked another way. I sought materials of compen- 
sation in another hemisphere. Contemplating Spain such 
as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that if France 
had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I call- 
ed the New World into existence to redress the balance 
of the old.' What Roman harshness in the chastisement 
inflicted upon Afghanistan by England after the disastrous 
retreat of the army in 1842. Istalif a city of fifteen thou- 
sand souls is taken by assault, pillaged, burned. Not a man 
is spared. Caboul is made a heap of ruins. All the forts 
in the mountains are razed. Thereupon the English army 
withdraw, even then scarcely feeling avenged. 

England has always treated the politics, the sovereigns 
and princes of the Continent, very superciliously. An 
English fleet arrives one day in the bay of Naples. A 
captain disembarks, proceeds to the palace of the king, 
(afterwards Charles III. of Spain), lays a watch upon the 
table, and announces that if a treaty of neutrality is not 
signed within an hour, the bombardment will commence. 
The treaty was signed and the squadron sailed out of the 
port twenty-four hours after entering. Spain, Portugal, 
Greece, Naples, Denmark, have all had their turn in learn- 
ing the weight of English friendship. 

The bombardment of Copenhagen in the midst of pro- 
found peace taught the Danish Government, in 1807, how 



1 8 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

England never hesitates to go to any length when she finds 
herself threatened. Hear how an English poet, Campbell, 
celebrates this exploit : 

* Out spoke the victor then, 
As he hailed them over wave, 
Ye are brothers, ye are men ! 
And we conquer but to save : — 
So peace instead of death let us bring; 
But yield, proud foe, thy fleet, 
With the crews, at England's feet. 
And make submission meet 
To our king.' — 

Battle of the Baltic, 

What singular naivete in the arrogance. The 
Dane is to be proud of delivering up his vessels to Eng- 
land. After taking them, she otfers to shake hands. That 
should suffice for his consolation. 

The union of so many races has produced, in fine, a 
genius most complex. It is no longer Teutonic genius in 
its barbarian purity. It presents an indefinable blending of 
the vague and the trenchant ; a taste for business with a 
taste for revery, adroitness with bewilderment, a love of 
responsibility with perpetual scruples, submissiveness with 
independence, profundity with platitude, vanity with awk- 
wardness. Life, for all its being such a spiritual, inner 
life, is encumbered with ostentation, ponderous luxury, 
ruinous formalism. 

The aristocratic class owes its qualities as much to its 
origin as to its privileges. It has more suppleness, more 
fertility of mind, than the laboring classes, restricted as 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. jg 

they are to a narrow groove. We encounter more simplici- 
ty, more assurance, more bonhommie ; we miss that perpet- 
ual tension which keeps the bourgeois ill at ease. Celtic 
unconcern is found especially in the lowest classes. It is 
seen in the rude country feasts that have given to Eng- 
land its surname of " Merry England." A veritable Saxon 
in his hours of toil, slow, patient, strong, the workman reas- 
sumes the Celtic nature in his noisy or his melancholy hours 
of leisure, in his loves, half-animal, half-poetical, in the 
visions that flit through his drunkenness. The blood of the 
last conquerers does not flow through his veins, he knows 
not ambition. His broad shoulders support the entire 
edifice of British wealth and glory. Having no long-cher- 
ished desires, he has no hates. Politics are for him a sort 
of drama, where he plays the spectator. He is brutal ; he 
is pugnacious without being bloodthirsty. 

The English race has not received any fresh stock since 
the Norman Conquest. Natural selection, operating with- 
in fixed limits, has created a sort of variety of the human 
species, the peculiar traits of which have become more and 
more sharply defined. But atavism has a constant ten- 
dency to reproduce the primitive traits. Like every thing 
highly artificial, it degenerates rapidly. It must be kept 
up incessantly by education, law, religion, opinion. It is 
easy to discern the roots of barbarian sentiments and pas- 
sions, brutal roughness, cupidity, naive adoration of great- 
ness, eclat, money, and power. The empirical spirit, 
caught in a thousand fetters and illogical, rejects abstrac- 
tions, general ideas. It admires, it loves, a painstaking 



20 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

mediocrity. In what other country would Lord Liverpool 
have kept himself in power during a terrible war and dur- 
ing twelve years of ever troubled peace ? A statesman 
without views or ideas, he distanced Grenville, Wellesley 
and Canning, because he was inferior to them. 

In the last century, English manners, covered with a thin 
French veil, are at bottom extremely coarse. The courts 
of George I. and George 11. are Teutonic in their brutality. 
Charles II. decked his vices with elegance. George II. 
makes a cynical display of them. Read the letters of Lady 
Mary Montagu. The name of rake is worn as stylishly 
by the ladies as by the gentlemen of quality. The princess- 
dowager (1754) speaks* of the universal depravity of young 
men of distinction, women selling themselves, duchesses 
in the dress of men taking part in the masquerades of 
women of the town. Men of quality laughed at the law. 
" You threaten me with the law," says Lovelace contemptu- 
ously to Clarissa. Members of parliament sold their votes ; 
directors and inspectors of charitable institutions robbed 
the poor. In France, when one heard in the eighteenth 
century of any thing harsh, low, ferocious, the remark was, 
" How very English." {Letters of Madame du Deffand.) 

Beneath the thick mould of Teutonic barbarism, not yet 
exhausted, deep springs are flowing, unknown, invisible. 
Everywhere reason is coupled with fiction, in politics, reli- 
gion, laws, manners. Superstition and formalism com- 
mingle with practical sense. A vein of disquiet, insatiety, 

* Dod's Diary, p. 326. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EN GUSH RACE. 2 1 

runs through these lives apparently so satisfied, placid, 
and well regulated. The soul, constantly held in check, 
as if by a spring, has a sort of double life, the one betray- 
ing itself in volition, method, action, its logical life, the 
other an illogical, capricious life, made up of dreams, 
sterile contemplations, and chimeras. 

The literature is the faithful expression of these tenden- 
cies. It delights either in a sort of naturalism that thrusts 
man outside of himself or in a lyricism that loses itself in 
the abysses of the hidden life. The literatures of Greece 
and Rome, of Germany and France, equal or excel the 
English literature on certain points. But it does not yield 
to any one of them in power of imagination and in moral 
clearsightedness. The imagination of Shakespeare has 
created a world as real as the veritable one. Vv^hat is 
there like the imagination of Coleridge, so wild, fierce, dar- 
ing ? What savage and almost superhuman grandeur in 
Byron ! How he has depicted the troubles, the raptures, 
the loathings, the wraths of a soul at once eager and world- 
weary. His pride outstripped even that of the proudest 
aristocracy in the world. Long did it bleed under the 
arrows of this demigod, this modern Apollo. 

Conscience, more nervous, we might say, than it is in 
other races, is always aroused. Behind the silence, the 
coldness of the body are hid terrible tempests. These 
scene-shifters are always engaged in displaying the secret 
mechanism of passion. However timid they may be in 
real life, they are bold and daring in the hidden life. Their 
poets are Narcissuses contemplating themselves not with 



22 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

love but with fear and trembling, at times with horror, the 
horror of the Puritan and the wild beast. Their loves are 
not the easy and sensual delights of the South ; they are 
perturbations of spirit, ardors as mystic as they are carnal, 
dashed by sadness without reason. They love moral tem- 
pests, as their sailors love stormy and dangerous seas. 
These restless souls do not wish to be appeased. They 
are ever striving after the unknown, the invisible. What 
bitter sadness, what languor without consolation, in the 
songs of Shelley ! What an intimate sense of the infinite, 
of the eternal and pitiless force that lives in the world. 

" O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! 
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed, 
A heavy weight of hours has charmed and bowed 
One too, like thee, tameless and swift and proud." 

Ode to the West Wind. 

Death recurs to them incessantly in their reveries, even 
in their love-songs. It is one of their muses. Shakes- 
peare greets it familiarly, is always ready to stir up bones 
and jest at life and beauty. 

" Golden lads and girls all must, 
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust." — 

Cymbeline. 

The pleasantry of Lamb, that charming, subtle, delicate 
spirit, full of feminine tenderness, often becomes funereal. 
He invents titles like the%e, " On the character of an Un- 
dertaker," " On the inconveniences resulting from being 
hanged." A certain amount of crudity is not displeasing. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 



23 



The verve of Hogarth borders upon ferocity. His designs 
make one tremble rather than laugh. Vice, as Defoe 
paints it, is methodical, staid, has an air, I might say, of 
being thoroughly domesticated, that is more frightful than 
the easy, reckless vice of the Latins. Compare the Manon 
Lescaut of France, poetic and touching, even in her vice, 
with the English Manon, Moll Flanders, whose life Defoe 
has recounted, the woman who, as we learn from the title- 
page " was born in Newgate, was twelve year a whore, five 
times a wife, (whereof once to her own brother), twelve 
year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at 
last grew rich, lived honest and died a penitent." 

Melancholy implants herself as a natural flower in 
these serious souls. Shakespeare exclaims : 

" How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable 
Seem to me all the uses of this world." 

Hamlet. 

Thomas Warton writes, at the age of seventeen, a poem 
on ^' The Pleasures of Melancholy." Fletcher also sings 
of her, depicts her with folded arms, with fixed and down- 
cast gaze, and fettered tongue. Milton, in his Penseroso 
adores the nymph : 

" All in a robe of darkest grain." * 

Listen, however, to these stanzas, that came to Shelley 
beneath the bright sky of Naples : 

* The author has fallen into the common error of considering Mil- 
ton's phrase " darkest grain," as tantamount to black. In reality, the 
color meant \% purple. For the proof, and the important corollaries 
the reader is referred to Marsli, " On the English Language," p. 66, Tr. 



24 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



" Yet now despair itself is mild, 
Even as the wind and waters are ; 
I could lie down, like a tired child. 
And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne and yet must bear, 
Till death, like sleep, might steal on me 
And I might feel in the warm air 
My cheek grow cold and hear the sea 
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony." 

These sad, mistrustful, dissatisfied hearts have need 
of a friend, some mute confidant. Nature takes the 
place. Hence their love for nature is tenderer than that 
of any other people. They seek her out everywhere ; lose 
themselves in her contemplation. But nothing can sup- 
plant with them the familiar scenes of England : 

" And one, an English home — gray twilight poured 
On dewy pastures, dewy trees. 
Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, 
A haunt of ancient peace." 

Palace of A rt. 

Such is indeed the impression made by the English 
landscape, with its delicate and subdued tints, its sombre 
verdure, its houses resting on the heavy green sward — a 
repose like that of lilies floating on the slumbering lake. 
Nowhere wildness. The verdure is thick without disorder, 
the lines of the furrows are parallel, the hedges well trim- 
med. Nature has been kept in subjection for centuries. 
But the ever changing light, the ever shifting breeze, give 
her a sort of soul and life. 

Beneath this soft sky, favorable to prolonged contem- 
plation, the eye learns to hunt out the humblest, most 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 



25 



familiar details. Crabbe describes even weeds and bram- 
bles ; he is the Theocritus of a wretched parish, of the 
workhouse. His landscapes, like the miniatures of Gray, 
remind us of the Dutch school. Who has succeeded 
better than Goldsmith in describing rural life, the humble 
happiness that dwells by the glebe ? Wordsworth loves 
nature as a savage loves it, as the forester loves his forest. 
He seeks a soul in all things visible. The love of nature 
animates even the artificial and pompous rhetoric of 
Thomson's Seasons, like a flower of the fields astray in a 
carefully 1 aid-out parterre. 

The race is at once too contemplative and too active 
to excel in the arts. When it wishes to translate its 
thoughts, it prefers the living, pliant tongue of poetry to 
expression by form or color. Its intense, vehement 
genius knows not the norms and limits which are the 
essence of art. In painting, it selects the glaring, harsh 
rainbow tints, as if to defy nature. It creates for itself 
an artificial sun, an exaggerated light. The women are 
fond of striking colors in dress. In their pale blond 
beauty, ideal, soft and dreamy, they seem always to select 
what is least becoming. English art knows not that 
supreme indifference, that contentment, which breathes 
and pulses through joyous, unconscious nature. We 
always see the will, the effort, behind. In every writer 
there lurks the moralist. The pedant Johnson admired 
only those poems in which he found some moral lesson. 
Their engineers build admirably, nothing checks their 
audacity. But they work less as artists than as money- 



26 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

makers. One thing done, they hurry on to the next. 
Their aim is the useful, not the beautiful. 

Thus this race, unique, has two souls, as it were, the 
one male, the other female. Discontented and rebellious 
by instinct, reason leads it to content itself with the com- 
monplace and mediocre. Disposed to revery and 
contemplation, it astonishes the world by its activity. A 
passionate lover of independence, it is ever in quest of 
new duties, ever imposing on itself new obligations. It is 
at once humdrum and original. It has never learned to 
do without liberty or victims. It adores wealth, but it is 
as generous as it is greedy. It worships chance, and has 
a liking for rule and order.* 

II. 

English blood has not received any foreign elements 
since the Norman conquest. Natural selection, operating 
within narrow limits, has blended the barbarian races and 
produced a new race. During this slow genesis a new 
society was forming, perfectly unchecked in its natural 
and, so to speak, organic development. 

Political empiricism operated in England under the 
easiest conditions. For Great Britain has always been 
Great Britain ; the boundaries having been fixed by nature. 
The peoples of the rest of Europe have spent centuries in 
seeking, some are to this day still seeking their limits. 

* The original is epigrammatic and hopelessly untranslatable : 
elle a le culte du hasard et le gout de la regie. — Tr. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGIISH RACE. 



27 



War has shifted their frontiers a hundred times, separating, 
joining, separating anew, provinces, races, idioms. Wher- 
ever national unity has not been effected, the nation is 
perforce mih'tary. The English people has always been 
warlike, it has never been military. And not being mili- 
tary, it has become free. 

It became so in advance of all other peoples. In this 
isolated land, barbarian freedom became the bond of union 
no longer of petty hordes but of a people ; served as the 
aegis not of provinces but of a state. The sraallness of 
the territory has made the greatness of the nation. In 
order that the idea of a fatherland may control each indi- 
vidual, break down all resistance, and animate every heart, 
the fatherland must have some visible shape. What more 
suitable than that of an island ? The ocean surrounds it, 
limits it, chisels it into form. 

English liberty is not a conquest made by reason or 
philosophy. It is the ancient patrimony of the barbarian 
races. United into a nation, they found no more natural 
way of protecting their independence than to entrust it to 
freemen. This liberty knows nothing of the servile vio- 
lence of revolt, or the quibbles of jurists, or philosophic 
theories. It is a living thing, connate, unconscious like 
instinct, akin to the forces of nature. 

Our minds, accustomed to regard liberty either as a 
gift or a conquest, an octroi or a right, are strangers to 
this singular disinterestedness that has always subordinated 
equality to liberty, this barbarian ideal that instils into 
every man the sentiment of independence, and yet at the 



28 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



same time makes him feel the need of choosing his own 
master. This ideal, which was the soul of chivalry, de- 
manding self-abnegation and sacrifice, we have long since 
ceased to comprehend. We are still willing to shed our 
blood for our country, but we are no longer wiUing to give 
up to it one iota of what we deem our rights. The Latin 
races perceive liberty only through equality. The Anglo 
Saxon race has never seen equality but through the 

medium of liberty. 

In a narrow island, always under menace, jealous of 
every power that might gain the preponderance in Europe, 
the instinct of self-preservation must prevail over all. The 
feudal forces were promptly compacted into the national 
fasces. In a people animated by patriotism, the individual 
thinks less about himself than about the nation. The 
fatherland is a sort of visible, living, stirring god, who, like 
the human body, needs different organs for different func- 
tions. The men have no other aspiration than to contrib- 
ute their efforts towards the health and beauty of this im- 
mortal body. The work is all honorable. It occasions no 
surprise that the feet do not resemble the head. Some 
live on the surface, the epidermis, in the light of day. Oth- 
ers circulate invisible through the arteries of the great 
body, or are attached to the heavy, massive bony structure 
that gives strength and resistance. The members of such 
a society are ignorant of envy \ to them inequality seems 
even necessary. They think much less about their rights 
than their duties. They find grandeur in littleness, they 
forget themselves, they make themselves grains of dust of 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 29 

their own accord. So long as they feel the vague counter- 
stroke oi all the emotions of the body, the atoms are con- 
tent. 

External nature herself has contributed her share to- 
ward suppressing in the English breast the love of equality. 
In cold countries, where the climate is rough, she places 
more distance between man and man. The rich and the 
poor, the laborer and the idler, are not so widely sundered 
in the happy lands of idleness and gay unconcern. Here 
the sun gilds and warms the tattered garb, the senses are 
easily satisfied, the mind becomes refined and discovers 
everywhere perpetual delight. 

Equality could not but be born in Greece and Italy. 
A man is a man in climes where the atmosphere, bright 
waters, the blue sky, are the chief riches. One does not 
feel the need of shutting himself up in closed abodes, 
places of refuge that exclude the wind, the cold, rain, and 
disease. Art steps boldly out, makes itself public, rears 
fair monuments that have no owner and belong only to the 
gods. 

But in a northern isle, lashed by furious winds, wept 
over by incessant rains, wrapped in fogs, man is more re- 
mote from man. He hides himself, shuts himself in. 
What a distance between the peasant and the dweller in 
cities, between the poor and the rich, between those hum- 
ble lives of suffering that are but one long struggle and 
one long pang and those other lives that are the triumph 
of art, wealth, human ingenuity! The contrast seems at 
last a necessity, the voice of fate, like the contrast between 



30 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Ugliness and beauty. Nobody is astonished. Strange ! 
Envy is least strong precisely where there is the most to 
be envied. On the other hand, manly struggle against the 
blind and overwhelming forces of nature renders man more 
kindly disposed toward his fellow, more indulgent toward 
the happiness of others. The world over, sailors are kind j 
they have but one enemy, the sea. 

This inequality, that comes of nature, by inheritance, 
and by mutual consent, far from weakening patriotism, 
sustains and strengthens it. Envy does not course like a 
hidden poison through the veins of the nation. In France, 
there are persons for whom the history of their country 
ends, others for whom it begins, in '89. No one, most as- 
suredly, dreams any longer of courting foreign alliances, 
after the matter-of-course fashion of parties, princes and 
even royalty itself, in the olden time. But there are 
always nations within the nation, and they do not willingly 
reunite except upon the field of battle. In England, na- 
tional greatness, British ambition, touch the same chords 
in the patrician and th.e serf, the bourgeois and the work- 
man, the soldier and the cockney. The Saxon mind 
does not mistrust or jest at its own feelings. I do not find 
in the English language a word that can render the senti- 
ment which we call chauvinisme, English patriotism is 
?ia"ive, like egoism. It knows neither doubt, nor discus- 
sion, nor hesitation nor remorse. It nev^er abases those 
whom it has exalted. England worships its heroes. To- 
ward those who have served it, who have added 
aught to its power or renown, its more than kingly grati- 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 31 

tude knows no bounds. It does not fall into the jealous 
ostracism of democracies; less from calculation than from 
a natural disposition to greaten everything that it touches. 
Our gifts bear the price that we ourselves seem to put 
upon them. So England never disparages the price of her 
favors. Among men thus formed, glory and even simple 
esteem seem to be inestimable treasures. Travellers 
penetrate to the centre of Africa, to the glaciers of the 
North, suffer hunger and thirst, undergo a thousand 
dangers, and deem themselves amply rewarded by a com- 
pliment from the Geographical Society or a shake of their 
sovereign's hand. Of what are these Englishmen in the 
Indies thinking, they more powerful than kings, surrounded 
by Asiatic pomp and luxury ? Of the day when they can 
live in some gloomy street in May Fair. If we could take 
in all the seas at a glance, we should observe little 
points moving from all sides towards the same centre. 
Those are the vessels making their way from every corner 
of the globe to the ports of Great Britain. The thoughts 
also are hieing from all quarters toward this one pole. 
The English ideal follows the Englishman into every coun- 
try, and envelops him in a coat-of-mail, as it were, or a 
cloud. Asiatic effeminacy, Latin levity, the gayety of child- 
ish nations, have no hold upon these solid, grave, lofty 
characters. Commerce, war, wealth, arts, material labor, 
never make them lose sight of the mother country. 



32 EN'GLAN'D POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



III. 

The English ideal is of a different kind from that of 
Rome or Greece. Rome believed chiefly in its power, 
Greece in its genius ; England, in its moral excellence. 
Its faith therein is full, sincere, unqualified, not to be 
shaken by any thing. It reiterates incessantly to itself what 
Cowper said to it : • 

* My native nook of earth ! Thy dime is rude. 
Replete with vapors, and disposes much 
All hearts to sadness, and none more than mine. 

Thy unadulterate manners are less soft 
And plausible than social life requires. 
And thou hast need of discipline and art 
To give thee what politer France receives 
From nature's bounty, — that humane address 
And sweetness without which no pleasure is 
In converse, either starred by cold reserve. 
Or flushed with fierce dispute and senseless brawL 
Yet being free, I love thee/ — 

The Task. 

Nelson knew perfectly the men to whom he said at Trafal- 
gar, these simple words : " England expects every man to 
do his duty." 

I take the following lines from Robertson, a minister 
in the Anglican church. They describe the common feel- 
ing : " Goodness, duty, sacrifice, these are the qualities 
that England honors. She gapes and wonders now and 
then, like an awkward peasant, at some other things — 
railway kings, electro-biology, and other trumperies — but 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 33 

nothing stirs her grand old heart down to its central deeps, 
universally and long, except the Right. She puts on her 
shawl very badly, and she is awkward enough in a concert- 
room, scarcely knowing a Swedish nightingale from a jack- 
daw; but — blessings large and long upon her I — she 
knows how to teach her sons to sink like men among 
sharks and billows, without parade, without display, as if 
duty were the most natural thing in the world, and she 
never mistakes long an actor for a hero, or a hero for an 
actor. Men like Arnold and Wordsworth she recognizes 
at last ; men like Wellington, more visibly right, at once, 
and with unalterable fidelity." 

A certain cool heroism, an ever tense inward energy, 
force keeping itself within bounds, a virtue that disdains 
appearances and is somewhat shy, these are the character- 
istics in which England is always pleased to recognize her- 
self. The bass note of duty resounds through all her 
words. She believes herself to be better, superior. She 
beholds all the nations of Europe engaged in a vain and 
wretched struggle for the things that she has long enjoyed. 
Her institutions and her political career have seduced the 
other nations. She holds them up in triumph to all the 
world, but she considers them as really good only for her- 
self. She has struggled victoriously against the greatest 
nations of the world, against Spain at the height of her 
power, against France. Her empire is so vast that she 
feels disposed to give up provinces rather than to conquer 
new ones. Her powerful hand can no longer close upon 
all that it holds. She is apprehensive lest, like Rome, her 
2=^ 



34 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



only preservation may lie in further aggrandizement. She 
contemplates with anxious pride that Britain, great after 
a very different fashion from Great Britain, that is extend- 
ing its borders in every direction, in every zone, in both 
hemispheres. 

It is surprising that such triumphs, such continued 
good fortune, should not have softened somewhat the barba- 
rian harshness of English patriotism. There is always a 
dash of acrimony, severity, resentment, and contempt, in 
the opinion which it forms of other countries. In many re- 
spects England is more insular to-day than it was in the 
last century. During the fourteen years of peace from 
1762 to 1776, her relations with France were uninterrupted. 
It was the age when Walpole corresponded with Mme. du 
Deffand. Our books, our philosophies, were the fashion. 
The disgrace of the Due de Choiseul, the downfall of our 
parliaments, were great events in England. English liter- 
ature had deviated from its own path ; the drama borrowed 
its inspiration from tragedy and accepted our discipline. 
The English aristocracy submitted to the ascendency of 
the French aristocracy and our polished society. It took 
lessons of Saint- Evremond, Grammont, Voltaire. The Re- 
volution and the Empire enbroiled England with the con- 
tinent. Her fortune and even her existence in jeopardy, 
England, enraged, felt her hatreds and traditionary suspi- 
cions revive. The confused drama of our revolutions aston- 
ishes and irritates her ; our sudden starts and turns baffle 
her wisdom. After Louis XIV._, after wars and bankrupt- 
cy, she thought that nothing remained of France. After 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 



35 



Waterloo, the case becomes different. Our greatness and 
ever-increasing prosperity disconcert and alarm her. But 
our mobility makes her more immovable, our lightness 
makes her more headstrong. Moreover, imitation sits well 
only on mediocrity. England judges us better, but she does 
not dream of copying us. Were Hogarth still alive, he 
would no longer draw the daily contrast between his Eng- 
lishman, vigorous, wellfed, robust, and his puny French- 
man, a cook and a dancing-master. Our fashions, our 
literature, our manners, have their adepts across the chan- 
nel. But perhaps we should not be over-proud of it. 
This Gallomania goes little beyond our faults and our vices. 
It thinks to prove its sympathy by ridiculing what does its 
own country most honor, and by flattering what liberal 
France detests and dreads. 

We should beware of confounding this minority, made 
up of libertines and idlers, with the nation. This latter is 
still insular and maintains its sturdy faith in itself. If there 
be any thing that could really cause it anxiety, it would be 
the sight of the transformations which the ideal Anglo 
Saxon policy has been forced to undergo in emigrating to 
new countries where there was neither royalty nor aristoc- 
racy. But so long as its prosperity lasts, so long as its 
power meets with no reverse, it is not likely to be put out 
of conceit with that of which itself was the instrument. 
Like a vessel at anchor, it holds by the past. The con- 
tracts upon which its liberties rest do not, like so many 
constitutions that it has seen perish, lay open vistas of the 
future ; they emerge from the very gloom of history. They 



36 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



create no new rights, they confirm ancient ones. Their au- 
thority is wrapped in the mists of tradition. The Magna 
Charta did not establish liberty, it only formulated its guar- 
anties ; it was an effect, not a cause; the flower, not the root. 
The men who carried on the revolution of 1688, one of 
the most daring in history, were preoccupied about the 
Great Seal that the king had, in his flight, thrown into the 
Thames. Old parchments, forms, relics, symbols are 
treated with the Philistine respect of Germany. The law 
is not philosophical, like that of the Latins ; it is organic, 
resembling a body that is incessantly destroying and re- 
newing itself. Those who carried out the religious refor- 
mation preserved all that they could of the ancient faith. 
Nothing is destroyed but what can no longer be propped 
up. England is like some ancient forest, where the timber 
is never felled and the dead trees fall across the living. 
Routine serves as a sort of top-soil mould to progress. 
Can it be believed ? There were slaves in Scotland down 
to 1799. The miners were sold with the mines. Children 
that had never worked in the mine were regarded as free, 
but how could parents do without their labor ? The statute 
of 1701, which has been boasted of as the Scottish /^^^mx 
corpus act, and which does actually secure the liberty of the 
individual, has these words : " And sick-like it is hereby 
provided and declared that this present act is noways to be 
extended to colliers or salters." The Act oi George III. 
(1799) first proclaimed that the miners " shall be free from 
their servitude." * 

* Memorial of his Time, by Henry Cockburn. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. 



37 



This superstitious veneration for the past is only another 
form of patriotism. England is the Narcissus of history, 
loving itself, admiring itself, transporting everywhere its man- 
ners, its customs, its political ideal. It has conferred upon 
itself, in Jamaica, the two houses, a Court of the King's 
Bench, Court of Common Pleas, Exchequer, Chancery, 
Admiralty, Grand and Petty Juries, Justices of the Peace, 
Courts of Quarter-Sessions, Coroners, Constables. It no 
longer makes revolutions because it is always in a state of 
revolution. But that is putting it too strongly. England 
is rather undergoing a perpetual metamorphosis, which some 
say is too slow, others too rapid. Too slow, if we have re- 
gard to all that still remains of Gothic institutions, of ex- 
ceptions, privileges, anomalies, forms, and symbols which 
are at the present day meaningless. This slowness aston- 
ishes the historian. The confusion, the complications to 
which it gives rise, baffle frequently the wisdom of legisla- 
tors and judges. 

Let us not fall into any error, however, on this point. 
If the English race loves and respects the fictions with 
which its ancient institutions are invested, it is because 
these fictions are expected to serve as a sort of decoration 
to national greatness. The moment any thing puts in jeop- 
ardy the honor, the liberties of the country, the barbarian 
instinct revives. The untamed Saxon shakes off the fetters 
that have been laid upon him by Norman subtlety or Ro- 
man astuteness. He looks royalty in the face, tosses 
tribunals, star-chambers, hireling armies, lords, babbling 



38 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Commons about like playthings ; condemns Strafford, be- 
heads the king, locks up the door of parliament. 

History is not a succession of disconnected pictures. 
Let us not believe that there is no kinship between the 
England of to-day and the England of Cromwell. The 
passions that, under Cromwell, burst in such fury against 
everything that oppressed them are like deep waters flowing 
quietly before they gather for the plunge. 

Strange ! After having shown his strength, after hav- 
ing struck a few terrible blows, as if to reassure himself 
that his power is still intact, the Saxon is glad to return to 
his repose. The reign of the Round Heads was one of 
those brief storms that clear the atmosphere. Royalty was 
restored, but did the fetes and follies of the Restoration 
ever cause the terrible end of Charles I. to be forgotten ? 
He had essayed to represent upon the throne of England a 
foreign idea, that idea which the Grand Monarque was to 
seat upon the throne of France. If we study the portraits 
of Charles — at Hampton Court or in the Louvre — we shall 
look in vain for any thing English in that noble, delicate 
countenance, suggestive of dreams and chimeras. 



IIL 

Any great national calamity, any terrible blow given to 
that prestige which is preserved with so much art, persist- 
ency, firmness, in all quarters of the globe, would be a sore 
trial for England, for no other people has a more ndlvelov^ 
and admiration for success. The ancient constitution. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH RACE. ^g 

which now towers above all parties, would itself be shaken. 
To those for whom fortune is a god, a reverse is something 
terrible, for they have nothing that can console them. 
They feel themselves really debased by defeat. The wor- 
ship of success is only a transformation of that love of 
strength which is so natural and so necessary to barbarians. 
We can understand how the Saxons had hard work to be 
converted to the religion of a crucified One. The English 
mind has perhaps never comprehended fully the sublime 
foolishness of the cross. Its faith is no mysticism, it is a 
weapon for the struggle of life, a power, an instrument. 

The Latin mind is attracted by the weak, the con- 
quered j the trait is one of generosity, and also of vanity. 
We imagine naively that our friendship and our sympathies 
will serve as consolation for defeat. The French come out 
of every war, detesting their allies, and loving their enemies 
the more heartily the more they have beaten them. But 
English hatred still runs high even after victory. Weakness 
seems, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, something to be ashamed 
of, something bad and culpable. Altogether empirical, it 
believes that whatever endures, endures rightfully, that 
whatever triumphs, triumphs rightfully, whatever succumbs, 
succumbs rightfully. '* I say sometimes that strength, well 
understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing 
time ; if it can succeed, it is the right thing" (Carlyle, T/te 
Hero as Priest). Milton had said, long before, that to be 
weak was to be truly wretched. 

Still imbued with barbarian faith in destiny, nourished 
and pervaded by Calvinistic fatalism, the Anglo-Saxon 



40 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



spirit arms the will against obstacles, but makes it bow 
down before facts. Celtic imagination has always rebelled 
against the unknown God, against the irresistible force of 
facts. Teutonic reason is better regulated. The morrow 
of the battle of Tolbiacum it was that Clovis hesitated no 
longer, that he worshipped what he had burned, and burned 
what he had worshipped. Wealth, fortune, power, the 
possession of earthly goods, can there be anything truer 1 
No aristocracy receives parvenus in better faith than the 
English. Its winning adulation of them is thoroughly well 
meant. It absorbs power, talent, wealth, as naturally as a 
sponge sucks up water. It has none of those innate mis- 
trusts that make the aristocracies of the continent so un- 
bending ; while these are always, even in spite of themselves, 
so many negative poles, it is by nature a positive pole. 

The most important organ of the English press, the 
Times, has erected political empiricism into a theory. It 
always sides with the gods, never with Cato. It begins 
with one man, and ends with another. Its opinions are the 
faithful mirror of events. Austrian before the war, it be- 
came Italian after Magenta and Solferino. Its contempt 
of long standing for Prussia was converted on the morrow 
of Sadowa into unqualified admiration. 

The marble of the statues intended for Jefferson Davis 
and Stonewall Jackson assumed the forms of Lincoln and 
Grant. There is perhaps more sincerity than calculation, 
more naivete than cynicism, in this ready obedience to the 
decrees of force. Between Napoleon I. and England there 
was, at bottom, only a terrible misunderstanding. What 






CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EN GUSH RACE. 



41 



are rights and justice, if they cannot triumph? During 
the fluctuations of a long struggle, doubt is permissible, 
error excusable. But when final judgment has been given, 
what is the good of protesting? Who can out-reason 
history ? 

Has England such full and entire confidence in her 
own excellence because she has succeeded in everything, 
or has she succeeded because she has such confidence? 
It would be difficult to say. Her virtue is closely bound 
up in her prosperity. If she admires success in the af- 
fairs of others, with what passion must she seek it herself? 
She would cease to believe in her moral primacy, were she 
to lose its prize. Hence this primacy is her most precious 
possession, the source from which come her power, and 
wealth, and liberty. It is to preserve this primacy that 
statesmen and preachers labor, savans, women, artisans, 
writers, everything that has an arm or a soul. So many 
forces, ever active, ever kept on the stretch by conscience, 
are not occupied in merely maintaining an equilibrium or 
political institutions. Politics are only the instrument of 
national will and national ambition. England must be 
free, because no element of greatness must be wanting. 
Public interest is the supreme law. No people is more 
enamored of liberty ; yet it has never been able to distin- 
guish its interests from justice. Could anything be good 
that might harm it? But as soon as its eyes are directed 
abroad, they are covered by a veil, as it were. These up- 
right judgments become warped, these anxious consciences 
become hardened, when an enemy, or even a neighbor, 



42 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



comes in question. No sooner has patriotism caught the 
alarm than the irresistible force of instinct sweeps away 
every heart. Beneath the mute pressure of victorious 
passion, they all bend and turn towards the same pole. 
No order, no instructions are given. One single will seems 
to thrill in a twinkling through the entire nation. The 
press, the rostrum bend to it ; they do not dictate it. All 
parties do not hold the same language, but in secret they 
are one. Their very disputes serve^ at such times, as 
instruments for the common passion. 

But we should still not have the secret of this robust, 
intolerant, even at times unjust and cruel, faith, if we 
could find no other explanation for it than the egoism 
which is natural to every race and people, the isolation of 
centuries, the great void that surrounds every island and 
makes it a little universe in itself England is by nature 
insular, but its real originality began only with the Refor- 
mation. Ever since then the English people has consid- 
ered itself the chosen people, the elect 



CHAPTER II. 

The Characteristics of English Protestantism. 

BEFORE the Reformation, England was only a single 
bit in the great feudal mosaic. There was noth- 
ing to distinguish her from other nations. Protestants 
are fond of saying that England became free because 
she made herself Protestant. But how does it happen that 
she made herself Protestant ? 

We must add one more to the features by which I have 
already endeavored to characterize the Anglo-Saxon race. 
This race is eminently theological. Religion is a necessity 
to souls that lead a life of gloom, that are attracted to 
nature, not so much because of the sights she affords to 
the eye, as on account of her mysteries and her mute 
forces, souls that are incapable of repose, of joy and beat- 
itude. And what religion can suit them best? The 
religion of effort. To such a religion struggles of con- 
science, even the torments of doubt, are precious. Eng- 
land is not devoted to her faith because of the content- 
ment afforded by its full possession but because of the 
trouble involved in its acquisition. Hence it was that its 
faith could not remain catholic. We do not know Eng- 
land if we do not look beyond the English constitution. 



44 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

The constitution is a visible, time-worn veil, a venerable 
but battered garb covering a soul. And this soul ? Is 
liberty. Not philosophical liberty, founded upon reason, 
but Christian liberty, the liberty of the children of God, 
heirs of the promise. 

The French revolution was the work of philosophers ; 
the English, of protestants. Our theorists regarded polit- 
ical liberty as the mother of all other liberties. In Eng- 
land, it was religious liberty that gave birth to them all. 
The Bible enfranchised and at the same time enslaved the 
English mind. The barbarian conscience would not have 
any man as its master, and that man far away, a foreigner, 
of another race. It acknowledges no other master than 
God. It listens to and seeks to comprehend God's word. 
As late as George III., those who refused to believe that 
the Bible was an inspired book were treated as culprits. 
For the first offence they were pronounced incapable of 
taking any public office, for the second offence they were 
punished by imprisonment for three years and incapaci- 
tated for becoming executor or guardian and making or 
receiving a bequest. The Old Testament is as much read 
as the New. In court, the witnesses kiss the Bible. The 
judges on circuit attend divine service. The House of 
Commons has its chaplain, and every meeting { as in the 
Congress at Washington ) is opened with prayer. Politics 
and religion have never been divorced. Wilberforce owed 
the larger share of his parliamentary influence to his 
religious character. The emancipation of the slaves in the 
colonies, in which he took such a prominent part, was the 



ENGLISH P ROTES TA N TISM. 45 

work of the Evangelical party. Canning, at the beginning 
of a speech upon slavery, speaks for twenty minutes about 
*'the divine Author of our faith." When Mr. Bright 
makes an allusion to the cave of Adullam, there is not a 
person, from one end of England to the other, that does 
not know what he means. 

English literature abounds in theological writings and 
religious tractates. This spring never runs dry. Each 
generation of doctors leaves behind it the evidences of its 
faith, its investigations, its eftbrts. The writings of But- 
ler,* of Warburton, Middleton, Law, Watts, Whitefield, 
Wesley, the sermons of Blair, are no longer read ; but all 
those books have had their readers, and every day fresh 
ones are born only to be swallowed up in the ever-yawning 
abyss of theology. 

Religion is everywhere, enters into everything, en- 
croaches upon everything. The infidels, for such is the 
name given to those who dare to reject all religious author- 
ity, even that of the scriptures, are but a small band, scat- 
tered, timid, not coming in contact with the people. 
Whenever people speak of Gibbon, the illustrious author 
of " The Decline and Fall," an infidel and a Voltairean, 
they always try to make excuses for him. 

In 1 79 1, the populace of Birmingham broke into the 
house of Priestley, the chemist and philosopher, and 
burned his library and apparatus. He himself was forced 
to emigrate to America. There have always been philos- 

* Surely the author would not have us believe that Butler is no 
longer read ! Tr. 



46 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

ophers in England, but there never has been, and there is 
not even at this day, a philosophical party. The saying is 
not " No salvation without the church," but " No salvation 
without a church." 

No one is permitted to speak ironically of sacred things; 
they are protected by a sort of tacit understanding among 
all the beliefs. We cannot give to this religiousness the 
name of hypocrisy, even in cases where it is not deep- 
rooted in faith ; for those who cloak themselves in it de- 
ceive themselves as much as they deceive others. It is 
more just to say that the entire country is under a dense 
religious atmosphere that covers everything, throwing a 
cloud over politics, legislation, literature, philanthropy, 
education, manners. Protestantism it is, — not science or 
philosophy, — that is incessantly at work retouching and 
perfecting the moral ideal of the nation. It is protestantism 
that gives temper to its courage, inspires it with the sense 
of duty, and sustains it in its prolonged effort. 

England has had this singular good fortune, that in 
fighting for its own independence it fought also for the 
Reformation. It entered in arms in hand. During the 
long and terrible contests that it waged for civil liberty, 
and at the same time for religious liberty, it felt itself 
growing greater and more powerful, richer, freer, more 
dreaded, more glorious. Its entire history turns, as it were, 
upon a single idea. It has been able to believe sincerely 
that it was the people of God, the continuator of the 
Hebrews, the chosen people, the confidant of Providence, 
the instrument of His hidden designs, His soldiers against 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



47 



the impostures, the idolatry, the vanity of the new Gentiles. 
These barbarians, relegated to a corner of Europe, in fact 
almost beyond the pale of Europe, have conceived pity and 
contempt for the old nations spawned of the Roman 
world, with their kings, their emperors, their pontiffs. 
Their liberty has become a light-house, towards which all 
the nations of the earth turn their eyes ; their island is the 
pole of the moral world. 



II. 

Rome was too remote from England to make its pres- 
ence much felt. The barbarian spirit retained more of its 
wild independence here than in countries subjected for so 
many centuries to Latin discipline. The Saxons had al- 
leady refused to pay the Peter's pence when William of 
Normandy set out to combat Harold and conquer England. 
We know that Pope Hildebrand had sent him a consecrated 
banner and a bull, in which, without doubt, he excommu- 
nicated Harold and his adherents. The conqueror reestab- 
lished the Peter's pence, and sent Harold's banner to 
Rome. Hatred of the papacy sprang up in the hearts of 
the conquered. The Saxon prelates were replaced by 
Italians and Normans. The people began to look upon 
the bishops as enemies. 

But William himself soon shook off papal ties. He 
refused to pay homage to Hildebrand, and separated the 
jurisdiction of the counts from that of the bishops. The 
ecclesiastical judge still retained not a little power, and 



48 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



Rome continued to be, for certain matters, the supreme 
court of appeals, but the lay judge became independent. 

England was not carried away by the madness of the 
crusades. She took up arms only in the second, and even 
the adventures of Richard Coeur de Lion constitute an 
episode in the history of chivalry rather than an event in 
the history of England. Henry II. had already begun the 
attack upon the church. The constitutions of Clarendon 
subjected the clergy to the common law. The papal pro- 
tection was fatal to Thomas a Becket. The thunders of 
excommunication hurled from Rome had spent their force 
on reaching Canterbury. Henry's submission after the 
murder of Becket, — slaughtered in a cowardly manner on 
the steps of the altar, — was only a hypocritical lie. 

King John had to pay for his servility to the pope by 
the concession of Magna Charta. Having kneeled before 
the papal legate, he was now to bow before his own barons. 
The moral leader of the rebellious aristocracy was an Eng- 
lish bishop, Langton. Magna Charta was the treaty of 
alliance between the prelates and the barons. The church 
was already converting itself from being catholic to being 
national. 

For one century the same forces continue to operate : the 
jealousy of the crown, the pride of the prelates, the iso- 
lation of the country, the growing hatred of France. Little 
by little, under the reigns of the three Edwards, England, 
urged on more by instinct than by conscious intent, shakes 
off the ties that unite it to Catholic unity. For one hun- 
dred and fifty years after the Conquest the kings had them- 



EN'GLISH PRO TESTANTISM. ^g 

selves nominated the bishops, the archbishops, and the 
mitred abbots. After the concession of Magna Charta, how- 
ever, the chapters, now become independent, nominate their 
bishops and ask of the king only an empty " leave to 
elect." But the pope has to approve of the election before 
the bishop can be consecrated and receive the bull of in- 
vestiture. The same with the mitred abbots. The 
superiors of all the orders continue in communication with 
Rome. For the petty benefices and monasteries there are 
local patrons, laymen or clergy. But whenever any new 
institution is created, Rome is consulted as to forms. 

In 1306, however, an act of parliament forbids the 
superiors of orders resident out of England to levy taxes 
in English houses (Cistercians, Premonstrants, and the 
orders of St. Augustine and St. Benedict). Still they do 
not yet dare to attack the pope. But the statute of 135 1 
Edward III. is. aimed at him. For the first time the re- 
bellious parliament denies to the head of Christendom the 
right of ecclesiastical patronage in England. The strug- 
gle was long. The commons interpose themselves be- 
tween the crown and the papal thunderbolts, they defend 
their national sovereignty, their soil, from foreign masters. 
The spiritual lords do not separate their cause from that 
of the lords temporal. All three estates rally around the 
king. The statute o{ Prce77iunire (16 Richard II. c. 5. 1392) 
provides : That any person purchasing in the court of 
Rome or elsewhere any provisions, excommunications, 
bulls or other instruments whatsoever, and any person 
bringing such instruments within the realm, or receiving 
3 



50 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



them, or making notification of them, shall be put out of 
the King's protection, their lands and goods shall be for- 
feited, and they themselves, if they can be found, shall be 
attached and brought before the king and council, there to 
answer for their offence. 

The way of the Reformation is prepared, first, by the 
resistance of parliament, second, by the uprisings of con- 
science and morality against the abuses of the church. 
Chaucer scathes monks, false relics, vendors of indul- 
gences, in his verses. The emancipated serfs do not know 
what is heresy and what orthodoxy. They listen to the 
"poor priests" who spread throughout England the teach- 
ings of John Wycliffe. They are not astonished when 
they are informed that a bishop or a priest in a state of 
mortal sin has no authority over the faithful, that the 
scriptures forbid the ministers of the Lord having worldly 
goods, that confession is not so needful as contrition. 
From the very first day these two reformations confront 
one another, jealous rivals : the episcopal reformation and 
the popular reformation, the reformation of the lofty and 
the reformation of the lowly. 

Wycliffe himself was led astray by his dreams of prim- 
itive Christianity. He attacks the right of property, pro- 
nounces the forfeiture of the possessions of the sinner. 
The people take him at his word. London is sacked by 
the rabble who follow Wat Tyler. The lords, affrighted, 
wish to persecute the " poor priests," the vagabond apos- 
tles. But Wycliffe has still influence enough to protect 
them. By his death the Lollards lose their guide, their 



ENGLISH PRO TESTANTISM. 5 1 

luminary ; they soon come to be regarded as only vile 
fanatics and rebels, and are persecuted without mercy. 
It is against them that the act de heretico comburendo is 
passed (1400). 

Oldcastle attempts to rekindle the embers of heresy. 
He stirs up the last of the Lollards, and pays for the mad 
'attempt with his life. Apparently nothing remains of 
Wycliffe's work. The name of Oldcastle has become a 
laughing-stock, Shakespeare turns it into his FalstafF. 
Yet something has remained, — Wycliffe's Bible. What 
men have not been able to do, a book shall do. Manu- 
script copies circulate from hand to hand, secretly ; for a 
ferocious statute has interdicted the work of the Oxford 
reformer. Heresy grows up in the shade, in the fear of 
the scaffold. The spirit is weaving its invisible web for a 
hundred years, like a spider at work in the lofty cathedral 
arches. 

Why did Luther's terrible cry find immediate echo in 
England ? The Saxons recognized a brother in the dar- 
ing Saxon monk. The new doctrines, soon in possession 
of the ports of the North Sea, of Sweden and Denmark, 
were known to the sailors and merchants and carried by 
them to a soil all ready to receive them. The first pro- 
testant books, printed in Flanders, were smuggled in bales. 
Everything might be printed in the Free Towns (Sir 
Thomas More sends over the manuscript of his Utopia). 
The pulsations of the German heart were felt immediately 
in England. Tyndale visits Luther at Wittenberg (1525,) 



52 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



translates the Gospels and Epistles, and establishes at 
Antwerp a protestant bookstore. 

The first English Protestants were nobodies. In 1526 
a few weavers, carpenters and shoemakers organize them- 
selves into the " Christian Brotherhood." They have a 
committee in London, and purchase Bibles. They have 
agencies and colporteurs of the divine word. The habits 
of the clergy, — who go unchecked and revel in fat livings, 
— are more revolting to the people than to the upper 
classes. These christians have the naive belief that re- 
ligion does not consist altogether in pomp, ceremonies, 
and formulas. They conceive the true temple of God to 
be the soul, purified, sanctified and chaste. They worship 
in spirit. What effect can persecution have upon these 
souls whose life is with things invisible? Of what avail to 
bum bibles in front of St. Paul's ? The secret disease 
spreads even to the city of the clergy, Oxford ; it insinu- 
ates itself into Christ Church, the magnificent college 
founded by AYolsey. In vain does Wolsey turn perse- 
cutor, in vain More. In 153 1 Bainham is burned for 
daring to deny transubstantiation and assert, "that a 
Turk, a Jew, or a Saracen who believes in God and keeps 
his law is a good Christian." 

Other forces are at work in parliament. No sooner 
has that body met in 1329 than it submits to the king a 
petition which is virtually a long indictment of the ecclesi 
astical courts, clerical rapacity, and nepotism. Parlia- 
mentary reform was the uprising of the common law 
against the canonical, the gentry against the bishops. 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



53 



Have not the latter dared to demand of Henry VIII. 
that the common law be changed wherever it clashes with 
the canonical^ and refused to submit canonical decrees 
to the royal sanction ? Thus everything tended to the 
Reformation. Who is going to be persuaded into believ- 
ing, in this our day, that this great event was born only of 
the passion of an amorous king ? His will drifted from 
obedience to revolt. Beginning by defending the pope 
against Luther, he ended by making himself pope. He 
changes his theology as he changes his nuptial couch. 
Yet every crime is pardoned in a king who rejects Romish 
tyranny. He burns as heretics those who are for the Ref- 
ormation, but he hangs those who recognize the authority 
of Rome. He confiscates the estates of the convents, 
which had become owners of a fourth part of the soil. 
The ancient rites are thrown aside, the ancient altars 
broken, the stoles torn in pieces ; the episcopate barely 
escapes. But royalty clings to it instinctively, not from 
love for Rome but from love for what had made Rome's 
visible grandeur. Servile Cranmer takes the middle 
course between Rome and Geneva. He makes the king 
the temporal and spiritual sovereign of the country, en- 
trusts him with the right of binding and loosing, the right 
of ordaining priests. A sanguinary code suppresses all 
resistance. 

Even at this day England is not shocked overmuch at 
the apparition of this superb and terrible king, this pontiff 
and dictator, whose favor was as much to be dreaded as 
his wrath, whose love was a death-warrant. The marriage 



54 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



that he had tried to bring about between Catholic doctrines 
and Anglican independence ended badly, like all his mar- 
riages. After his death, the Reformation was mistress of 
England. The reign of Mary was only an interregnum. 
Her terrible persecutions, the execution of Cranmer, made 
the name of Rome an object of horror with the nation. 
England had its autos-da-fe^ like Spain. The figure of 
Philip, Mary's husband, crosses the stage of English his- 
tory for a moment, like the spectre of the inquisition. 
During this brief reign two hundred and eighty persons 
were burned. The inquisition was on the point of estab- 
lishing its tribunals in Great Britain, and thus clutching 
Europe at both ends, when Mary died. With Elizabeth 
protestantism ascended the throne. The passionate devo- 
tion with which she inspired her people was preeminently 
a religious passion, a fanaticism. Under her at last 
triumphed the idea — so dear to the English people — of an 
English national church. This word "national church," 
which causes the philosopher to smile as much as would 
that of " national God," does not cause the politician any 
astonishment, for religious belief is a political power. 
There is always a community of feeling, hidden or manifest, 
among all the catholic peoples, among the protestant 
peoples, among the Mussulmen. 

The historic greatness of Elizabeth is due to this, that 
she was from the very first conscious of her mission. The 
woman was subservient to the queen. Had she not been 
a protestant, she were a usurper, a bastard. She makes 
haste to reject Romish supremacy. Refractory bishops 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



55 



are replaced by proscribed theologians. The flood of the 
Reformation, checked for awhile, sweeps away everything, 
but of nine thousand four hundred priests who are called 
upon to conform to the new ritual, only two hundred re- 
main true to the ancient faith and give up their livings. 
Among the lower orders of the clergy there was no 
secession. 



III. 



Elizabeth had on her side the protestants of England 
and Scotland, the States General, the King of Navarre ; 
but Mary Stuart had Rome, France, Spain. The war 
between the two religions became a duel between two 
women. Elizabeth, so humane at the outset and almost 
tolerant, became terrible when Pius V. excommunicated 
XhQ pretended queen of England. The throne was her honor, 
heresy her salvation. The passions of the girl, the woman 
and the rival will explain her whole conduct. 

But for Scotland, it is doubtful whether she would have 
triumphed. We might be astonished at first sight, perhaps, 
that the Reformation should make its way among a people 
so obstinately attached to its traditions. At the commence- 
ment of the sixteenth century Scotland is still feudal. No 
large cities, no independent bourgeoisie. The poor, un- 
productive country is only a perpetual field of battle. The 
folk is wretched and superstitious; thei)arons are rapacious, 
jealous, always plundering, always at swords' points. The 
war with England has lasted a thousand years. The Celts 



56 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



of the mountains and the descendants of the Scandinavians 
settled in the valleys waste their courage and their hered- 
itary ferocity in fruitless contests. Royalty is the vassal 
of the great nobles. The church holds half the soil. We 
cannot doubt but that this wealth disposed the hearts of 
the barons to the Reformation. The new religion, like the 
old, assured them of heaven, without denying them the 
object of their desires upon earth. 

But the Reformation did not at first entice the great. 
It made its way into the fields and hovels, among the low- 
ly. It gave a soul to this people without one, it spake 
with stern voice to these sons of the pirates, these brigands, 
it won over these wild hearts by the very pangs, the terrors 
and struggles of spiritual life. They preferred Mosaic 
rigidity to the infinite gentleness of the New Testament, 
the inspired word and the threatening exhortations, the 
reproaches and objurgations, of preachers to symbolic pomp. 
The clannish*spirit found expression in congregations and 
presbyteries, but a grand hierarchy, whether catholic or 
anglican, could not suit so well a nation of a rebellious 
turn of mind. If the English mind suggests to us a uni- 
form plain sweeping away to the distant horizon, the 
Scotch rather suggests the narrow upper valleys of the 
mountain, shut in with a girdle of rock and forest. The 
grand blasts of the centuries scarcely reach these remote 
and petty associations, where conscience is at work slowly 
distilling intolerance. Here the Scotch character was 
formed, a character marked by love of self-imposed rule, 
by a sturdy and rough good sense, by calculating honesty. 



ENGLISH PRO TESTANTISM. 5 y 

sardonic taciturnity and shrewd bonhomie. Judging by 
the roughness, the quick sallies, and the keenness that 
this character has preserved even in our day, we can imagine 
what Scotland must have been in the times of John Knox 
and the Lords of the Congregation. Men who never 
dreamed of shrinking from death were to inflict it on others 
with startling serenity. Combats, danger, prolonged 
hatreds, were to them a necessity. 

Religious passion, in itself sombre and cruel, was still 
more inflamed by national passion. Could a French queen, 
the tool of her LfOrraine brothers, surrounded by popish 
soldiers and gentlemen, be anything else than an enemy ? 
Scarcely is the breath out of James, when the Lords of the 
Congregation declare war upon his widow. Knox excites 
and supports them, and revives their spirits depressed by 
the unfortunate siege of Leith. Elizabeth, now the soul 
of the protestant league, sends subsidies to the Scotch. 

As soon as the Scottish parliament got a little elbow- 
room, the entire structure of catholic hierarchy was de- 
molished in a day. Never had the like been seen before ; 
the church was ruined by her very excess of power. She 
had slowly acquired more than one half the land in Scot- 
land, and that the most fertile part. The bishops and 
abbots were accomplices in the work of spoliation. No 
resistance, no martyrs. The estates of the clergy were 
delivered up to the greedy nobles by the clergy them- 
selves. Only a small fraction of the revenues was re- 
served for the new clergy. Knox had demanded that 
there should be a division by thirds : one third for the 

3* 



58 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



clergy, one for the schools, one for the poor. Instead of 
this, the nobles made terms with the bishops so as to get 
everything. They left scarcely a sixth to the presbyte- 
ries. " Two parts," says Knox, " went to the devil, and 
the third was divided between the devil and God." The 
Church of Scotland became the poorest, the most wretched 
in the world. Numbers of ministers had to content them- 
selves with an income of one hundred Scottish marks, less 
than six pounds sterling. 

Yet Knox's bargain with the lords is capable of 
explanation. They wanted the land, he did not want 
prelacy. To him the episcopacy was almost as much an 
object of horror as the papacy. 

In England, owing to the conjuncture of events, the 
Reformation had been effected with the aid of the king. 
In Scotland it was effected without royalty and even in 
spite of royalty. Hence it could take a very different 
course. Still the two reformations felt a certain solidarity 
of interest. Elizabeth, although hating Knox, is obliged 
to back his cause. Both pursue the same chimerical ideal, 
doctrinal unity. Faith must be freely inquired after in 
the sacred books, but all souls must find there the same 
faith. Tolerance of error seems almost a crime, heresy 
is persecuted rigorously. Knox witnesses the burning of 
a sorceress before his own eyes. Elizabeth persecutes 
the Anabaptists and Puritans. The elder Melvine, 
preaching before James VI., says to him, '' There are two 
kings and two kingdoms. There is Christ and his king- 
dom, the Church, of which King James is the subject, and 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



59 



of this kingdom he is neither the king, nor the head, nor 
the lord, but a simple member." In England, church and 
state are one. In Scotland, civil society is only the hand- 
maid of a greater society of which Christ is the King. 
Pastors regard themselves as the natural guides of the 
state, and lecture the sovereign. Knox makes Mary 
Stuart tremble. The chaplains of the weak-minded James 
liken his favorites to Haman, himself to Herod or Jero- 
boam. The distinction between the spiritual and the 
temporal was rather subtle for barons wishing to round 
off their estates and at the same time win heaven, for a 
royalty that wishes to remain master of both soul and 
body. The church of Christ was to become a visible 
church, stronger, more powerful, more tenacious than its 
neighbors. Liberty engendered the spirit of sect, and 
the spirit of sect engendered tyranny. 

The sickly child of Mary Stuart had in his hand, for a 
moment, the lot of both countries. He could not love the 
Reformation with a sincere love ; he disputed the right of 
pastors to convert all their pulpits into rostrums, and. 
dying, advised his sons to trust rather a wild Highlander, 
a ferocious borderer, than a Puritan. Could he regard 
Elizabeth, whose alliance and degrading deviation he sub- 
mitted to, otherwise than with secret horror ? He cher- 
ished in his mind the chimera of the divine right of kings 
and made a timid attempt to restore episcopacy in Scotland, 
but he found himself carried away incessantly by the char- 
acter of his royal title, by the dangers of his position, per- 
haps by his very scruples and remorse. 



6o ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Having become king of England, he found in his new 
country one half of the population still catholic. One 
third of the peers, the half of the rural gentry, two thirds 
of the peasantry had remained true to the ancient faith. 

The real notions of the king betray themselves in these 
words, uttered to the ambassador. La Broderie (June 
twentieth, 1606) : " If the pope would consent to be the 
chief and first of bishops, there would be no difficulty in 
recognizing him as such. But as to his setting himself 
above kings, not one ought to submit to it." Puisieux, 
French secretary, writes, July twenty-second, 1608, to 
Rome : " James consents to recognize the pope as the 
primate of bishops, if he will renounce his pretended right 
of interdicting kings." 

Disputatious and theological, James argued with the 
Puritans. His aphorism was ; " No bishop, no king." 
He would have liked for all England " one doctrine, one 
discipline, one religion, both in substance and in cere- 
mony." He wished to retain the cross and the surplice. 

James' tolerance exasperated the Puritans more than the 
persecutions of Elizabeth had done. The latter troubled 
their faith without disturbing their hatred, for Rome was 
still the common enemy. But when the eyes of royalty 
were redirected to the ancient religion, the king, his servile 
bishops, and his official church became objects of suspicion. 
From that time the Puritans believe themselves to be the 
real representatives of the Reformation. Their church be- 
comes the church militant, their ministers are the lieuten- 
ants of the army of the Lord, the soldiers of that Jesus 



ENGLISH PRO TESTANTISM. 6 1 

who had come not to bring peace upon earth but a sword. 
The new ritual reminds them too much of the Romish. 
They wish no more sacerdotal ornaments, no host, no gen- 
uflexions. The sombre spirit of the Lollards revives in 
them. Some ministers refuse to baptize children by other 
than scriptural names. The new saints assume symbolic 
names, such as Deliverance, Discipline, Earth, Dust, Fight 
the Good Fight, etc., just as subsequently the French 
republicans take the names of Brutus and Demosthenes. 

The peculiar feature of this new protestantism is that 
for written prayer, the written word, become, an empty 
form, it substitutes the living word, inspiration, the ser- 
mon. What power it was to derive from that change ! 
Nothing works upon men so much as human speech. He 
seems to be present at, to participate in, a sort of creation. 
Improvisation unchecked by rule follows wherever the 
spirit leads, touches upon everything, recoils from nothing. 
The Puritan minister is a tribune all the more audacious 
because God seems to speak through his mouth. He 
clothes politics in familiar words and phrases, expressions 
taken from the scriptures. His eloquence has in it some- 
thing impersonal. It envelops itself in mystic terrors, 
the lightnings and thunder of Sinai, all the while address- 
ing the most direct, the most sordid, earthly interests. 
It confounds the vulgar and the divine, passion and faith. 



62 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



IV. 

The development of the Puritan spirit marks a new 
era in religious history. On certain points the new sec- 
taries resemble those famous orders that propagated the 
catholic faith and made themselves apostles of the chris- 
tian ideal. But whereas these latter point the people to 
heaven, the Puritans point it to earth. The barbarian spirit 
of the Anglo-Saxons cannot be content with a kingdom 
that is not of this world. The church of Christ must be 
established here below, heaven must begin on earth. No 
mercy for those who dare to molest this occupancy of the 
saints. The noble catholic ideal, by consoling the Chris- 
tian for poverty, oppression, and his own weakness, dis- 
arms him for attack, either upon others or himself. The 
Puritan ideal inspires him with indomitable energy. 

Shall I be saved ? Shall I be lost ? That is the ter- 
rible question which no one can answer with assurance. 
But since by faith alone the sinner is justified, faith alone 
can remove his dread of the inexorable future and give 
him some trembling hope. He clings, then, to his faith 
as his only chance of salvation, seeks it out, would fain 
feel it, as the mother feels the movements of the child she 
has conceived. What better way of recognizing it than 
by the bursts of anger and horror that he experiences 
toward impiety ? How can one find the gold in a deposit 
without rejecting the sand and mud? Whatever is vain 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 63 

seems to him something to be regretted and put aside, 
such as bells, statues, pictures, frivolous amusements, 
dancing, the popular sports and pagan festivities of Christ- 
mas. The Puritans wish to dress England in black. 
They assume a sombre mien, wear their hair straight and 
long, speak in a sort of biblical jargon. This constant 
effort of the will is recognizable even in the nasaled into- 
nations of the voice. 

The Gunpowder Plot raised the hatred of Rome and 
the Jesuits to the highest pitch of frenzy. Popular imagi- 
nation could dream of nothing but crimes. At the death 
of James T, the established church was half heretic. To 
all appearance, the edifice of royal and episcopal faith 
stood very firm, a high court of commission punished 
every attack upon its liturgy and doctrines. But the last 
primate, Abbot, had opened softly the doors of the church 
to Puritan teachings. 

Laud endeavored to rectify the evil ; he proclaimed 
in his canons the divine right of kings. The non-con- 
formists emigrated to Holland and New England. Charles, 
supported by his obedient bishops, thought the moment 
had arrived to introduce bishops into Scotland. The 
owners of the former estates of the church, the Presby- 
terians, and the Puritans form a coalition against him. 
The struggle begins. The king and his primate pursue 
this dream : namely to reunite the Church of England to 
the Church of Rome, but maintaining the principles and 
independence of the Church of England. They are 
aware of the attachment of the country to old traditions. 



64 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

The Anglican bishops have never consented to relinquish 
the sacred privilege of apostolic succession. They are, 
they wish to be, the successors of the apostles. Is not 
the laying on of hands the outward sign of a sort of 
religious heirship, like the monarchical principle ? Eliza- 
beth and her councillors had not been willing to give up 
this privilege. The scholars of Oxford, from whom the 
bishops were chosen, were less English, we might say, 
than the rest of the nation. Belles-lettres, their habits 
as schoolmen, connected them closely with Europe. They 
formed a sort of intellectual aristocracy, rather refined for 
one of the coarsest of generations. The lower clergy, 
poorly off, rendered still more plebeian since the impover- 
ishment of the church by Henry's reformation, were little 
more than upper servants in the houses of the nobihty. 
A young lady of rank could not marry a priest. Chap- 
lains took their wives among chambermaids. The country 
priests were ignorant, brutal, and servile. The prelates, 
a petty caste among the clergy, cherished the memory of 
the splendors of Wolsey. Without sharing all the pas- 
sions of the Stuarts, they made themselves their obsequious 
servants. The Anglican church became monarchical. 
It departed more and more from Calvin, from the Pres- 
bytery, from all republican teachings, and approximated 
more to Arminius. 

The danger for the Reformation was great. Scotland 
met the injunctions of Laud with the Covenant. Noble- 
men, ministers, men of every class, swore to resist all 
religious innovations, to labor in restoring purity of faith, 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



65 



to root out heresy, and to become living examples of 
Christian virtue. In England, the two confronting parties 
were about equal. On the one hand, the king and bish- 
ops, all that adhered to them, all that admired the out- 
ward splendor of the monarchy and the episcopate. On 
the other, the Puritans, the bourgeois, the merchants of 
London, who traded with the Low Countries, who admired 
the prosperity of the Free Towns and had applauded the 
heroic struggle of a republic against the Spaniards. 
Money has already become a new power in the state. 
Parliament takes it in charge and defends private wealth 
against the king. 

The reformation effected by the crown is on the point 
of betraying the protestant cause. The second reformation 
is a parliamentary one. The Commons convert themselves 
into a veritable ecumenical council. They wish to extir- 
pate every vestige of Rome, to cut it down " root and 
branch.'* Political liberty is the sword of faith. The 
founders of parliamentary government are not so much 
statesmen as doctors, casuists, theologians. When Scot- 
land sends her army to the aid of parliament, this is the 
proclamation that marches at the head : Our conscience 
and God, who is above our conscience, bear us witness 
that we desire only the glory of God, the peace of the two 
nations, and the honor of the king, by suppressing and 
punishing by law those who trouble Israel, the Korahs, the 
Baalams, the Doegs, the Rabshakehs, the Hamans, the 
Tobiahs, the Sanballats of our times. This done, we shall 



e^e ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



be content— The bishops are " priests of Baal." The 
liturgy is called ironically " lethargy." 

Parliament becomes an arena for the doctors. Shall 
people bow, or not, at the name of Jesus ? Shall there be 
a grating before the altar ? Shall the choir be higher than 
the nave ? These are the questions discussed. The bish- 
ops are driven out of the House of Lords. Parliament 
proclaims the sovereignty of the people. It dares to say 
that the government belongs to the citizens, that kings 
may be deposed. The soldiers of parliament drink upon 
the altar of Westminster, and bivouac in the venerable 
abbey. Churches are torn down, statues demolished from 
hatred of Laud. Horses and pigs are baptized in chapels, 
tombs are desecrated and the dust of the dead scattered to 
the winds. The chambers force all the members of the 
clergy to swear allegiance to the Covenant. Priests who 
have been ordained by bishops are called upon to aid in 
destroying episcopal regime. Seven thousand refuse to 
take the oath. An enormous number, showing how deeply 
rooted the established religion was, and what great moral 
authority it still possessed. This profound hostility, hiding 
its head in the fields, wearing a threatening mien in the 
castles, goaded the passion of the Puritans to frenzy. 
England witnessed at that time something like the scenes 
in France at the end of the last century. 

Royalty is disarmed and a prisoner. The Presbyterians 
would fain save it. They were the first to strike it down, 
but they dread to see that institution fall which serves as 
the pillar of English history and the English constitution. 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



67 



Slaves to form, they always pretended, even while fighting 
against the king, to fight for royalty. Opposed to them 
are the Independents, to whom forms and fictions matter 
little. They have fought with the Bible in one hand, the 
sword in the other. Their only constitution is the scrip- 
tures. They are soon masters. 

Why enter into any humble negotiations at Hampton 
Court with this man, who is only a king now because peo- 
ple still speak of His Majesty ? What he promises with 
his lips, can he promise it with his heart .'' " For all our 
battles," says Cromwell, " we should have nothing but a 
scrap of paper." 

Cromwell, in this terrible hour, represents brute force, 
that England which, trailing its long drapery of the past, 
can yet, in certain emergencies when its progress is 
impeded and it has need of all its strength, throw off and 
rend to pieces these useless vestments and step forth naked 
as a barbarian gladiator. Luxuriatque toris ani?nosum 
pectus. 

The empty noise of parliamentary disputes soon 
becomes wearisome to this taciturn soldier. England, Scot- 
land, and Ireland are overthrown ; what is to become of 
parliament ? It has no longer any pole, any equilibrium. 
It seeks a new sovereign. Why should not this new sov- 
ereign be the nation ? There is talk of equalizing the 
electoral districts, of unrestricted suffrage, of a kind of 
Assemblee constituante. Cromwell interrupts the dream by 
remaining alone as dictator and Protector. He derives 
his right from might. He knows that at least the half of 



eS ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

England is silenced but not convinced. He believes him- 
self to be the Moses of the new elect. He is a humble, 
grave, sombre master, oppressed at times by the weight of 
responsibility that Providence has placed upon him. He 
knows his nation, would like to restore one chamber. But 
no sooner are his parliaments convened than they interro- 
gate him and call upon him for his titles. 

What is the real question at the bottom of all these 
troubles, this disorder, this ridiculous jargon of sects, 
this perturbation of minds ? All concur on one point. 
The state must be religious, it must not be atheistic, indif- 
ferent, or sceptical. But shall the state be subordinate to 
the church, or the church to the state? Shall temporal 
interests yield to spiritual, or vice versa ? Shall the law 
settle faith, or faith the law ? A new cult had been set up 
in place of the old. Psalms and sermons had been substi- 
tuted for ceremonies. No more symbols of faith or church 
commandments. Even the Lord's prayer had been pro- 
scribed, and everything that might remind one of a doc- 
trine of tradition, regulation, and obedience. The human 
soul was to express itself freely in speech and song. Crom- 
well tried to check the most violent excesses of this license, 
to suppress the unwholesome growth of sects. His terri- 
ble dictatorship did not succeed in destroying the invisible 
forces that bind England to the past, to monarchical and 
episcopal institutions, but it kept them in impotence long 
enough to insure the future possibility of dissenting 
churches existing side by side with the Establishment. 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 69 



This is evident from what ensued. The Reformation 
had passed through these phases. At first it had been 
royal, then parliamentary, at last theocratic. Every great 
moral resolution ends in compromise, for there is almost 
always something necessary and legitimate in each one of 
the interests contending for victory. The Puritan cause 
might have seemed for a moment utterly lost. England, 
worn out, barren, exhausted as if by a long fast, fell back 
into the arms of royalty and episcopacy. The Restoration 
was an orgy. The sternly chaste muse of Milton was 
driven out by shameless courtesan muses. It is the self- 
chastisement of all tyranny to wear out the most profound 
springs of action in the human heart, making them a thing 
of no avail, without strength and without repute. As we 
see the licentious Directory succeeding, in France, the 
Reign of Terror, so the reign of the Puritans was followed 
by the reign of pleasure. 

Charles II. was by nature not so much tolerant as 
indifferent and indolent. As soon as he had set foot on 
English soil, the former bishops showed their heads. The 
Presbyterians, in a majority in the House of Commons, 
hoped for a moment that they would be able to establish 
their liturgy. Bat the king was of the opinion that the 
Presbytery "was not a religion fit for a gentleman." He 
first tried tolerance, in order to rehabituate the nation 
to the ceremonies proscribed by the Presbyterians. He 



70 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



then published an act of uniformity excluding from the 
established church such ministers as had not received 
episcopal ordination. At the same time all ministers 
were required to subscribe to a declaration stigmatizing 
resistance to the king as illegal under any pretext what- 
ever. 

It is easy to see how the minds of men had become 
worn and bent by civil war. It will be remembered that 
more than seven thousand ministers had given up their 
livings rather than subscribe to the Covenant. The new 
Act of Uniformity evoked only two thousand protests. 
Non-conformist ministers were forbidden to settle or 
return within five miles of their former church (Five Miles 
Act). Dissenters and Catholics were involved in the same 
disgrace. But the king arrogated to himself the right of 
suspending the penal laws, a right by which the Catholics 
alone would have profited. This assumption aroused 
both the Anglicans and the enemies of the royal preroga- 
tive, and the Commons frustrated the plans of the king by 
passing the Test Act, which remained in force as late as 
George IV. This act compelled every public officer, 
civil or military, to take the oath of supremacy, to sign a 
declaration against transubstantiation, and to commune 
in public according to the rites of the Church of England. 

Henceforth there were two nations, as it were, within 
the nation. The Anglican Church, once more Episcopal, 
marked the boundaries of a sort of legalized religious 
country. Outside those boundaries, the fragments of the 
Puritan sects continued to vegetate, but formed, together 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



71 



with the Catholics, a caste without political rights and 
laboring under the most revolting civil disabilities. 

The spirit of sect had killed political liberty. Political 
liberty turned against the spirit of sect. It remained true 
to Protestantism, but regulated and organized it after a 
fashion. Parliament could not have for its enemy a 
church whose laws it protected, whose ranks it had 
recruited, whose enemies it had weakened. The church 
became the creature of the state, instead of being its ruler 
or its rival. 

The secret hostility of royalty to Protestantism still 
continued. The king, and his catholic brother, the Duke 
of York, belong less to England than to Louis XIV. By 
signing the shameful treaty of Dover (1670), Charles 
became the vassal of France. As soon as the nation 
suspected the king, protestant passion became once more 
a sort of rage. Excited imaginations saw plots every- 
where. The stories of Titus Gates found credence. The 
alliance between Parliament and the Established Church 
was drawn closer. The Commons wished to exclude the 
Duke of York from the succession, and the minds of the 
people were turned to Monmouth, an illegitimate son of 
the king. The eloquence of Halifax, however, succeeded 
in moving the lords to throw out the Bill of Exclusion. 
The king triumphed, and the reaction of the Tories 
against their adversaries was terrible. Monmouth was 
exiled, Russel and Sidney perished on the Scaffold. The 
Duke of York, although excluded by the Test Act from 
public office, took his place in the Council. On his 



72 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



death-bed, Charles II. received the sacrament from the 
hands of a Catholic priest. With his successor, James II., 
Catholicism ascended the throne. After one hundred 
and twenty-seven years of exile, it reentered Westminster. 

Had James himself been tolerant, he might, perhaps, 
have succeeded in establishing the principle of tolerance 
and obtaining the abrogation of the penal laws bearing 
upon Catholics and Dissenters. But his intolerance and 
bad faith ruined everything. He was a born persecutor. 
He called upon the Scottish parliament for still more fero- 
cious laws against the refractory Presbyterians. Death 
and confiscation of property were pronounced against such 
as should preach in closed conventicles or be present at 
conventicles held in the open air. Not merely did James 
wish to restore to Catholics civil and political equality \ he 
even aspired to make Catholicism once more the state 
religion and to suppress all the others, like his neighbor in 
France. He attempted to reduce to complete subjection 
a parliament that he had found composed almost altogether 
of Tories devoted to the royal cause. He permitted his 
nephew, Monmouth, to be executed, because the people 
loved the young rebel as a protestant prince. After the 
" bloody assizes," he makes Jeffreys his chancellor. He 
attempts to convert the people by publishing the private 
papers of Charles I., the martyr-king. He makes the 
courts adjudicate to him the right of dispensing individual 
Catholics from the operation of laws passed against them. 
He profits by this to fill the army with Catholics. To 
them he gives livings, positions in the universities. He 



ENGLISH P ROTES TA iV TISM. 



73 



endeavors to make use of his ecclesiastical supremacy for 
creating a court of High Commission, destined to oppress 
the church. He confers upon five commissioners absolute 
authority over the bishops, and sets Jeffreys among the 
number. The bishop of London is suspended from his 
spiritual functions. In Scotland, in like manner, the king 
resorts to his ecclesiastical supremacy. He admits Cath- 
olics to the highest offices, all the while continuing to 
persecute the Presbyterians. He announces his intention 
of opening a Catholic chapel in Holyrood palace. The 
spiritual head of two churches, he turns his authority 
against both. 

Having perceived that he could not convert the Angli- 
cans, he essayed to form a league with the Dissenters. He 
published a proclamation of " indulgence," and permitted 
the public exercises of all the cults. He suspended not 
only penal laws but political disabilities based upon 
religion. The Dissenters wavered for a moment. But 
English passion soon carried the day. They became the 
allies of the Anglican against the Romish church, of the 
parliament against the king. The latter still held out, and 
made a second proclamation of indulgence and ordered it 
to be read in all the churches. Seven bishops disobeyed. 
On the day when they were led to the Tower, James ceased 
to be king. The entire nation appeared with the bishops 
before the court of King's Bench. Their acquittal was the 
deliverance of the nation. The last of the Stuarts had 
united everything against himself, aristocratic, hierarchical, 
episcopal Protestantism, and leveling, popular Protest- 
4 



74 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

antism, the spirit of Laud and the spirit of Cromwell. The 
clergy that had suffered so much innocent blood to be shed, 
that had delivered over everything to royalty, now made 
common cause with sectaries. What the murder of Eliza- 
beth Gaunt, Alice Lisle, Monmouth, Argyle, what the 
infamous deeds of Jeffreys had not been able to do, was 
done by the arrest of the bishops. The sons of the Cava- 
liers and the sons of the Puritans found themselves fighting 
in the same ranks. The Revolution suppressed for a 
moment the wretched sectarian spirit and united all the 
Protestants. 

The Revolution of 1688 was religious rather than 
political. Hatred of papacy had more to do with it than 
love of law. As soon as the people heard of the flight 
of James, they turned their rage upon the Catholic 
churches, chapels and convents, against the printing-office 
in which the royal pamphlets had been published, and 
against the ambassadors of the Catholic powers. Scotland 
rose to a man and disarmed the Catholics. 

William was a good Protestant but no sectary. He 
showed favor to all reformists. His wife went to the 
length of saying that she could see no difference among 
the Protestant churches. But the new dynasty owed 
everything to a coalition of the higher Anglican clergy 
and the upper nobility. Foreign by origin, absorbed in 
European politics and able to take only a hasty and 
preoccupied glance at England, it accepted as a matter of 
course the role of arbiter which the English aristocracy 
was henceforth to impose upon its sovereigns. The 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 



75 



aristocracy, already master of parliament, had need of ati 
aristocratic church. The church became the partner of 
its grandeur, the instrument of its policy, its mouthpiece 
with the nation, one of the supports of that power which 
has for its accomplices, so to speak, nature and English 
soil. 

We see once more something similar to the partition 
of the feudal conquest among the king, the church, and 
the barons. Only, this time the latter got the lion's share. 
The clergy was no longer protected against the nobles by 
celibacy, by the confessional, by the prestige of a mystic, 
strange^ and almost supernatural life. The priests became 
the clients of the landed aristocracy, the church made 
itself the servant of the castle. Even doctrinal authority 
itself was subjected to the metamorphosis and the caprices 
of political authority. Episcopal pomp cannot hide the 
dependence of the Church. In vain does it drape itself 
in its apostolic origin. Everybody knows what is the 
source of its symbols of faith, everybody knows that 
parliament might, if it saw fit, lay hands upon the Act of 
Uniformity or the Thirty Nine Articles. When the two 
powers, the spiritual and the temporal, are confounded, 
either the priest must absorb the layman, or the layman 
the priest. In England, the religious sovereign has 
remained subordinate to the secular sovereign. The 
Anglican church helps to support a political edifice of 
which it is but a part. It submits to laws discussed and 
voted upon by laymen some of whom do not even 
acknowledge its doctrinal authority. It is a proprietary 



•J& 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



church, deriving its independence from its wealth; a 
political church, that has ever defended aristocratic priv- 
ileges and extolled the good old constitution, in a word, a 
terrestrial church. It was just the church to suit a society 
fond of strength, power, visible grandeur, incapable of 
divorcing for any length of time dream and reality, 
accustomed to estimate merit by fortune, and captivated 
with itself so naively as to accept the favors of fortune as 
the natural recompense for its virtues. 

No discrepancy between practical life and the ideal. 
Social duty and religious duty blend and interpenetrate so 
completely that they have become, as it were, inseparable. 
Importunity of thought does not throw the mind off its 
balance, but finds freedom enough within the bounds of 
national doctrine to avoid, with rare exceptions, the 
temptation of escaping from them. The thirty-nine articles 
shelter as well that indolent faith which seeks only repose 
and loves to feel itself borne along by the multitude and by 
tradition, as the more mobile faith which, like a climbing 
plant, throws out its tendrils in every direction but without 
detaching itself from the tree-stem. The aristocracy 
found a natural ally in a church, rich, well-endowed, 
independent enough to escape the semblance of servitude, 
carrying a political spirit into religion, and serving as a 
living bond of union between high and low. 

By the side of this fortunate and powerful religion, — 
a sort of compromise between Catholicism and Protest- 
antism, as the constitutional monarchy is a compromise 
between monarchical and repubhcan ideals, — there was 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 77 

only an obscure place left for Puritan protestantism, for 
religion suffering and unfortunate. On the outskirts of 
political society, compact, embracing as if in apotheosis 
royalty. Lords, Commons, and a small body of obedient 
electors, there was a great people, without a voice, without 
rights, a sort of social residuum and subsoil upon which 
flourished the tree of aristocracy. Here were hidden 
away the petty Protestant churches. Landed wealth, 
inherited wealth, easy circumstances, flourished in the 
shadow of the official church. The hard-earned wealth 
of merchants and traders demanded another church. 
Faith was more restless and lively in men engaged in 
business and manufactures, men of little or no means. 
It was the only spark of life in these dull, methodical 
existences. It answered them in place of pride, and 
consoled them for their unjust nothingness. Commerce 
and industry built up a second England by the side of 
England that measures herself by acres. The field 
laborers belonged to the one, the city workmen to the 
other. In their petty and despised churches was revived 
the tradition of the Lollards, those Puritan preachers who 
could hew out a pulpit with the hatchet before speaking 
in it, those theologians who did not know how to read, 
those ministers who regarded all reading but the Bible as 
sinful. Here was kept alive the hatred and invincible 
mistrust of Catholicism. Here the people heard again 
and again that the Catholic church justifies the means 
for the end, authorizes every crime committed with a view 
to the triumph of the church. The High Church, the 



78 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



tool of the aristocracy, thought only of increasing its 
wealth. Burnet complained that the Anglican clergy was 
the most despised in Europe \ its habits were loose, its 
avidity unparalleled, it was completely indifferent to the 
happiness of the people. A new reformation became 
necessary to restore it to a sense of its duties. This 
Wesley accomplished. He modified the spirit of the 
Church, and effected, without civil war, a religious 
revolution. 



VI. 

This singular man was a sort of Protestant apostle, 
or monk. Attracted by asceticism, he went to America, 
while very young, to live some time with the Moravian 
brethren. He has his ecstasies, and works miracles like 
a saint, by the power of his faith. He breaks down the 
barriers of the Anglican church and proposes to himself 
to save all men. His catholic love embraces all sinners, 
great and small. He bestows upon them his tears, his 
mystic, ardent, eloquent preaching. Especially does he 
arouse diseased minds, the disordered imaginations of the 
poor. His faith is like those epidemics that rage through 
the most unhealthy parts of a city. 

He preaches in the open air in the squares of Bristol, 
and yet there is nothing of thfe vulgar tribune about him. 
Raised at Oxford in the Anglican faith, he is a lover of 
order and decorum, but he feels himself urged on wherever 
there are souls to be saved. We should have a very poor 



ENGLISH PROTESTAN TISM. y^ 

understanding of the impetus given to England by tiiis new 
reformation, if we did not know how accessible the English 
mind is to religious ideas. Subjects which the Latin mind 
rejects with contempt, such as predestination, election, 
justification by faith, the English mind reverts to inces- 
santly, attracted by their very obscurity, by the terrors that 
surround them. The popular mind especially precipitates 
itself into the gulf of Calvinistic fatalism with a sort of 
sombre abandon. It loves this dreadful oscillation between 
the state of being lost and the state of being saved, between 
necessity and grace. It resembles an oarsman pulling 
courageously against a current that is sweeping him down 
to the abyss. 

Methodism did not overturn the Anglican church, but 
it brought about its moral reformation. It was the last 
outburst of the true Protestant spirit. It produced no 
political results, because it kept itself exclusively within 
an ideal domain. The state, moreover, by setting the sects 
at liberty, had disarmed them. Yet we may feel some 
astonishment that the laws enacted against Dissenters and 
Catholics should have remained so long in force, that the 
Protestants, belonging to free sects, should have bowed 
their heads for two centuries to barbarous edicts that 
excluded them from every political cooperation, from the 
honors of the city, from the army, the magistracy, the uni- 
versities. It was because they preferred remaining in the 
dust to seeing Catholicism emerge. Alas ! It seems as 
though intolerance alone can overcome intolerance, as 
though, to borrow the biblical jargon of the sectaries, none 



8o ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

but Beelzebub, prince of the devils, can cast out devils. 
The constant dread of the Dissenters was to see the Eng- 
lish prelacy and the monarchy become reconciled with 
Rome. They delivered up their humble selves to the official 
church, as a prey is thrown to a famished animal. Their 
disinterestedness and their patience proceeded from their 
hate. The dread of Rome was all-prevailing. The peo- 
ple had fashioned for itself a sort of bugaboo story out of 
St. Bartholomew, the assassination of Henry IV., the Gun- 
powder Plot, and the maxims of the casuists. Protestant 
loyalty had no faith in Catholic loyalty. Tillotson, 
preaching before the Commons, in 1678, puts the nation 
on its guard against a religion that is more dangerous than 
irreligion. Locke says, in his first letter upon tolerance, 
that a religion which teaches one not to keep his promises 
made to heretics is not deserving of toleration. These 
ideas, rooted for centuries in the English soul, hindered 
for a long time the emancipation of the Dissenters. They 
were not freed from the last of their shackles until 1828, 
one year before the Catholics. In order that civil equality 
might be established in England, Catholicism had to be 
rendered impotent, reduced to a shadow, almost to a mere 
reminiscence. 



ENGLISH PRO TES TAN TISM, g I 



VII. 

Religious passions have apparently moderated very 
much in England. Sectarian spirit seems to have become 
weakened, and we do not see any new churches started. 
There are still two main religious currents : the conserva- 
tive tendency and the liberal tendency, acting upon 
matters of faith and tinging them diversely. But people 
take no longer the same pleasure in theological discussions. 
The disputatious spirit of the nation exercises itself no 
longer upon them with the same furious passion. The 
ancient party names still exist, but rather as trophies of 
former battles than as actual party colors. 

The official church still comprises more than half the 
nation. Its political privileges, its immense wealth, its 
powerful hierarchy, insure it the primacy. More artificial, 
less democratic, and also, if I may use the expression, 
less humane than the Catholic church, which has such a 
disdain for all earthly distinctions, the Anglican church 
does not take the trouble to compete with sects for the 
possession of faithful whose presence would soil her tidy 
temples. The voluble bishop and the rural vicar, — the 
client and satellite of the gentry, — bear little resemblance 
to apostles. They know that everything which rises in 
the world will come to them by a sort of natural attraction. 
It is not displeasing to them to form a part of the great 
aristocratic system. And just as family trees will lose, 
generation by generation, a few branches that silently 



82 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

drop off, so the official religion has but a feeble hold upon 
those very members that are most in need of spiritual 
help. The spirit of the world permeates it, teaching it 
tolerance, informing it of the wants of the age, imparting 
to it a sort of charity which is rather civic than religious. 
Politics and rehgion are thus brought in close contact, they 
understand each other better than in any other country 
and help instead of combating each other. 

Nothing is simple in England. Principles the most 
opposite are at work, not so much in mutual destruction 
as in separate and independent development. The An- 
glican church represents the union of church and state ; 
the Dissenters represent the separation. The Methodists, 
the Independents or Congregationalists, the Baptists, the 
Unitarians, together with the many religious families that 
belong to these great orders, represent the democratic 
church as opposed to the aristocratic church, which has 
its spiritual lords, its archbishops and bishops, its chapters, 
canons, and prebends, its livings,* its tithes,! its earthly 

* There are 13,000 livings. More than half belong to the no- 
bility or to private individuals. The Crown has only 1,144 5 the 
bishops 1,853, the rest belongs to universities or corporations. The 
rector has the free use, for life, of the parsonage, and grounds, and 
the tithes. When the rents are appropriated to a corporation, the 
latter designates a vicar. Laymen founding a benefice reserve to 
themselves the right of choosing the beneficiary. The choice is 
subject to the bishop's veto, but the latter rarely uses his right. A 
priest cannot purchase the right of presentation (advowson). But the 
vilest publican can obkiin for money the right of presenting a priest. 
This right can be sold at auction. The auctioneer praises his wares : 
the incumbent well on in life, number of parishoners small, good 
hunting country, good society in the neighborhood, etc. etc. 

f The revenues of the church are not known exactly. The tithes 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 83 

wealth, greater than that of all the churches in Europe. 
The Dissenting Churches content themselves with liberty. 

The Anglican church, bound so to speak to English 
soil, firmly welded to its institutions, has never succeeded 
in expanding itself, in throwing out distant branches. We 
can scarcely think of it as existing outside of England. In 
Ireland, so near to its birth-place, it could establish and 
maintain itself only by tyranny. Its disgraceful wealth 
made its weakness only the more conspicuous, until at last 
an English parliament itself severed the tie that bound to 
the national church a conqueror-church hateful to the 
conquered. 

What could become of the Anglican church in the 
American colonies after they had proclaimed their inde- 
pendence ? The Episcopalians have there to-day their 
own self-government. They have still their bishops but 
the sovereign of England has long since ceased to be the 
Protector of their faith. There are Anglican bishoprics in 
Canada, in the East Indies, in the Antilles, in Australia, 

amount to about one hundred and twenty-five millions. They are 
generally in the form of a tithe-rent charge, slightly variable accord- 
ing to the price of wheat. In 1866 these tithe-rent charges, as fixed 
by the tithe-commissioners, amounted to one hundred millions. Of 
this sum twenty-five millions went to lay appropriators, (invested 
with the rights of a church and held only to maintain public worship 
in the parish), to schools, and to colleges. About sixteen millions 
went to clerical appropriators and their tenants. Only about sixty- 
two millions remain for the parish clergy. The total income of the 
Church has been estimated at two-hundred and fifty millions (includ- 
ing glebes, church places, and rights of surplice). The property of 
the Church is administered by an ecclesiastical commission, that 
pays the prelates fixed salaries. [These figures are in francs. Tr.j 



84 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

New Zealand, and South Africa. But if these distant dio- 
ceses are immense, the number of the faithful is very small. 
In these new countries, that have no historic reminiscences 
and where everything may be had for the effort, the free 
sects make readier conquests. The English race, emigrating 
thither, shakes off the fetters of the past as useless burdens 
and retains only its twofold love for civil liberty and for 
religious. It is at once the strength and the weakness of 
national churches to be bound to the soil, to that which is 
the cradle and the tomb of nations. National churches, 
by trammeling the mind with physical ties as well as spir- 
itual, become themselves indissolubly linked up with nature 
and history. The spirit alone sets the bounds of free 
churches. The same emotion thrills the Catholic heart in 
every corner of the globe. The Bible is still the Bible, 
whether at Sydney, or at Jamaica, or at Boston. Sectarian 
spirit can attract as much as it separates. In its armed 
struggle against slavery, the only allies that America had 
in England were the Dissenters, men inspired by the same 
sentiment as the abolitionists. 

Protestantism is an ever widening circle, at whose cen- 
tre the little Anglican church seems to become day by day 
smaller and smaller. The rays of that church lose their 
intensity in crossing seas, oceans, immense continents, 
until they finally die out on the line where English suprem- 
acy ceases to be recognized. The Protestant spirit deploys 
its full expansive force only in Dissenting sects set free 
from temporal clogs. It revives wherever the Bible can be 
introduced and municipal law does not repress freedom of 



ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM. 85 



worship. It seeks out and creates everywhere allies for 
England, but not, be it carefully noted, for the old England j 
for a new England, as democratic as it is free. 



CHAPTER III. 

The English Aristocracy, its Origin and Character, 

THE rule of a landed aristocracy that has secured 
itself in the possession of the soil, armed itself with 
legislative power, reduced the executive to the mere docile 
representative of its wishes, and succeeded finally in group- 
ing around it, without violence, by continuous and invinci- 
ble attraction, all the instincts of an energetic and patient 
race, such a rule is a moment unique in the history of the 
world. The power of England is like that of a bow always 
bent. No shocks, no rude collisions, no tyranny, but a 
terrible tension, bending everything before it, politics and 
manners, religion and laws. A sort of diffused will, that 
accepts every instrument as good, transmitting itself from 
generation to generation without distraction, without 
remorse, and without weakness. 

It can not be denied that England's greatness has been 
the work of an oligarchy, patrician enough for hereditary 
principle to insure habits of command and rejuvenated 
often enough by cross-breeding and fresh stock to escape 
degenerating. What are the peculiar features of this oli- 
garchy that has succeeded in making itself respected and 
dreaded by all Europe ? We may, it seems to me, sum 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRA C V. 8/ 

them up as follows : First, its effort has been to be an 
aristocracy, and not a nobility. Second, it has been not 
so much military as political. Third, it has created and 
fashioned the ideal of the nation, maintaining at all times 
its intellectual and moral primacy. Hence its social pres- 
tige is greater even than its power and could outlive the 
laws that might take away that power. 



I. 



The creation of such an aristocracy has not been the 
result of design. To get at the hidden causes, we must go 
back to nature herself. The sea has never hindered Eng- 
land from interfering in the affairs of the Continent. But 
since the Norman conquest. Great Britain has not been 
invaded. She has done her fighting abroad. She has 
distributed her blows over Europe, she has tried the weak 
spots in the armor, now of France, now of Spain, now of 
Holland. Her irregular and unexpected blows have more 
than once turned the scales. Her great military leaders, 
Marlborough, Clive, Wellington, have always come, so to 
speak, in the nick of time ; England is like an attentive 
looker-on, who knows how to join in a fracas. Still, her 
nobility and her people have not been condemned to perpet- 
ual warfare. She takes a sort of pride in being caught 
unprepared and gaining everything, the first danger over, by 
means of her savage tenacity and cool daring. She has not 
conquered her provinces piecemeal. Her national unity has 
always been assured to her. She has never been under 



88 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

the necessity of trying to find herself. How many other 
nations, on the contrary, have had to struggle for centuries 
not to live but merely to be born a»d to get their name ! 
Hence the profession of arms has never been considered 
in England as the only one suitable for a gentleman. The 
army was for a long time only a sort of royal guard. Even 
at this day it is the king's (queen's) army. The sovereign 
can, if he sees fit, depose a general officer.* Neverthe- 
less the jealousy of parliament has prevented the army 
from becoming an instrument of enslavement. The offi- 
cers, for the most part younger sons of the nobility, are 
thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the governing classes. 
The aristocracy has infused its spirit into the army, and 
remained its master, in anything but danger of being sub- 
jugated by it. The navy is indeed the property of the 
nation, is called the " British navy." It is the real defence 
of an isolated country, the most daring and the most terri- 
ble instrument of its power. But what has always been 
the highest reward for men of the army and the navy ? 
To be received into the number of hereditary legislators. 

The peculiar genius of the last conquerors will explain 
to us why England has always remained warlike without 
being ever really military. If the Normans loved battle, 
they also loved booty. In Normandy, Italy, Sicily or 
England, everywhere we see them the same, jealous of 

* It was by means of a royal warrant that the purchase and sale of 
'commissions in the army was abolished, July 26, 1871, by the 
Gladstone ministry. The house of Lords had tried to defer the re- 
form, and Gladstone, not able to carry it by parliamentary measures, 
accomplished it by making use of the royal prerogative. 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



89 



"gain," fond of land. During the crusades they are ready 
to forget the Holy Land and the sepulchre of Christ. Cel- 
tic and Latin folly does not entice these cold intellects 
away to the land of chimera and imagination. This north- 
ern race, tempered by cold, material, greedy, somewhat 
coarse-grained, is not apt to drop the substance for the 
shadow. The Christian conquerors of Sicily have no 
fanaticism, they do not persecute the Mussulman, they 
rather enjoy the harems of the emirs. They blend Arabian 
and Gothic architecture at Monreale, in the Palatine chapel. 
England never needed a Cervantes. With the fifteenth 
century chivalry fell into ridicule. The feudal wars were 
not waged for ideas ; they were agrarian wars. Death 
was not a sufficient penalty for revolt, so confiscation of 
property was superimposed. To whom did men pledge 
themselves ? To those who had given them fiefs. Men 
did not fight for remote interests, for words and symbols. 
They fought for things concrete, for fields, woods, the spoil 
of the vanquished. 

The Norman compagnons, lucky adventurers, fond of 
the chase and out-door life, had all England for a hunting- 
park. Feudal ties held the conquerors for a long time 
attached to France ; there was here an admirable and 
almost boundless domain ever open. England was for 
some time only a province. When France rose against 
those whom it called strangers, when it felt awakening 
within it the dim consciousness of being a nation, this her- 
itage had to be abandoned. Then the struggle in Eng- 
land became more terrible. The War of the Roses 



90 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



succeeded the Hundred Years' War. It was in reality a 
long contest for the possession of the soil. Conquerors and 
conquered were mixed up on both sides in the civil broils. 
These desperate quarrels attached the Norman aristocracy 
definitively to the island, which became its sole possession 
and its source of wealth. Saxon and Norman had hence- 
forth one and the same destiny, shared in the same aspira- 
tions. If England still waged war in Europe, it did so less 
with a view to making conquests than to securing its own 
independence. It sought for some time to come to hold a 
few positions, some tetes-de-pont, as it were, on the Continent. 
But isolated, narrowed down to its island, the aristocracy 
of the conquerors becomes more and more alienated from 
Europe. In this remote land, the feudal system, escaping 
from the influences of the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and 
the written law, expands, develops, transforms itself with 
the utmost freedom, influenced only by time, and those 
obscure instincts which constitute what we call national 
will. 

The real sovereignty belongs, in every country, to those 
who have the wealth, the capital ; and in barbarian times 
almost the only capital is land. The Norman Conquest 
was the dispossession of an entire people. As long as 
there was no other source of wealth in England than land, 
the territorial aristocracy were the exclusive masters of the 
country. The barbarian mind is not satisfied with an 
empire of the imagination, an ideal and nebulous royalty. 
It loves the evidences and the fruits of power. And what 
earthly sovereignty can be more complete than that which 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



91 



consists in the possession of the soil ? Recognize every- 
where in the masters of the soil the masters of a country. 
In modern times, commerce, industry, machinery have 
created new wealth. Immense capital thus accumulated, 
having for its ministering servants the shrewdest and most 
eager intellects and a host of workmen of flesh and blood 
and slaves of iron, has demanded its lawful share in the 
government. But landed wealth still remains the wealth 
par excellence. The gentleman who lives on his hereditary 
estates, surrounded by clients and docile servants, is the 
veritable king. He is the judge, he is the arbiter, he is 
the master. Everything belongs to him, the beasts of the 
forest, the birds, the air, the wind, the rain ; it is for him 
that the sap rises in the spring-time. He is not a creation 
of to-day. He does not lead a restless life hither and 
thither. He is borne along by the gentle movement of 
things that have no beginning and no end. He lives slowly, 
without fatigue and without fear. He is not so much an 
individual as the representative of a race. We salute in 
him royalty, rather than the king. We cannot imagine to 
ourselves a more perfect and complete possession, guaran- 
teed as it-is by law, by esteen, by common consent. Who 
can conceive — that has not experienced them — the delights 
of such a possession, free from everything precarious, this 
peculiar condition of a soul that feels itself in harmony with 
the eternal laws of nature? For man, are not three 
successive generations almost an eternity of time ? Here, 
the three ages can meet. The cradle is side by side with 
the tomb. The dream of life enacts itself upon the same 



92 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



scene, the actors have their exits and their entrances, all 
playing the same part. 

Why flee this dream, the most real of all earthly 
dreams? What is there preferable to it? It enters the 
very soul through the mute beauty of the trees and flowers, 
through the familiar lines of the horizon, through the undu- 
lations, every turn of which is well known, and calls up 
some association. Does man really possess anything, 
if he has not a few feet of ground that he can call his own ? 
Upon this favored soil, become the wife as it were of the 
family, is showered everything. It is dressed and adorned 
in a thousand ways, it is drained, one never grows weary 
of embellishing it and making it more fertile. All wealth 
proceeds from it, and all wealth returns to it. With its 
harvests there springs up also independence, that dearest 
possession of lofty souls j it is a sturdy and peaceful inde- 
pendence, knowing neither doubt nor fear. Beneath this 
soft sky, gazing on an horizon ever dimmed by delicate 
haze, the lulled spirit does not crave eager sensations. It 
has no need of the transports of ambition, it disdains the 
servile and shaming elegancies of the court, it preserves a 
sort of savage virginity. The chase, the ponderous vapors 
of solid repasts knd semi-intoxication full of vague reveries, 
loves almost animal, the cares of a semi-patriarchal admin- 
istration, the duties of hospitality at once simple and sump- 
tuous, suffice to fill out a life self-restricted to a narrow 
sphere. 

Land was scarce in Venice. Its aristocracy, one of 
traders, expended its wealth in feasts, in palaces, pictures, 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



93 



and statues. The English merchants, a thousand times 
richer than the Venetian, have never tried to rival the 
landed aristocracy with a new aristocracy. Bourgeois 
wealth, imprisoned within mansions of stone, vainly sets 
its wits to work to create new enchantments. It adorns 
its habitations, makes life comfortable and easy, perhaps 
too easy and too uniform. Thick carpets deaden the 
footfall, a thousand nothings, at first superfluous, become 
indispensable. But high art rarely lights up with its rays 
these artificial lives, this domestic pomp, this humdrum 
luxury and timid ostentation which constitute the atmo- 
sphere of city wealth. Hence great wealth flees the city and 
considers itself safe only when it is consolidated into some 
huge domain. Personal wealth always feels itself weak by 
the side of landed wealth. It views with envious eye 
antique castles guarded by the ages, donjons adorned by 
centenary ivy. Here may be read the entire history of 
England. Pevensey, occupied by William after the land- 
ing of his army, is still standing and belongs to the Caven- 
dish family. The companions of William covered the 
country with castles. One century after the invasion there 
were over a thousand of them. Monuments of servitude, 
they have since become places of refuge for liberty. The 
English aristocracy, then, has this characteristic, that it 
is not a military or a trading but a landed aristocracy. 
It has administered the country as a large estate is man- 
aged. Kings and ministers, even the greatest of them, 
have been its superintendents, public functionaries its 
tenants, armies its watch-dogs and shepherds. 



94 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



It will be necessary, however, to point out how the 
aristocracy has succeeded in keeping its territorial power 
and defending it from attack. English soil belongs to 
England, a sort of immortal legal person whose actual and 
shifting representative is the king. This latter is nominally 
the supreme lord, the tenant in capite, which means that 
the English nation has never relinquished a sort of right 
to the absolute ownership and undivided sovereignty of 
the territory of Great Britain. A foreigner can enjoy the 
liberties of the English constitution, but English soil is 
withheld from him.* The Englishman himself has scarcely 
any conception of the personal, undivided, absolute right 
of property as defined by the Roman law. The ancient 
Saxon law, barbarian in its nature and founded on custom, 
always resisted the law brought from Italy to Oxford by 
the Norman abbots. The clerks, as agents of Rome, con- 
tended for the Roman law. The Saxon owners — such of 
them as had been spared by the conquest — and the Nor- 
man nobles contended for the ancient customs, which 
restricted land to a race and did not recognize any indi- 
vidual right of property. 

To understand English legislation, one must rid his 
mind of all Latin notions. The conception of a thing as 
being in one's exclusive and complete possession, for use 
and abuse, can not be applied to English soil. No one 
has absolute power over the land. The freest estate is a 
fief of the sovereign. All the feudal links have been 
destroyed ; but the last one of all, the king, has remained. 
* At least until 1871. 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



95 



This general servitude of the soil, purely nominal, it is 
true, still denotes that individualism owes something to 
the community, the citizen to his country, that the land 
does not belong to those who produce the crops, and that 
the community still exercises over it some sort of indefina- 
ble and inalienable right. What we should call at the 
present day the State possesses a kind of soveregnity that 
is not merely ideal but material and tangible. The woods, 
the fields, the grain pay it homage. 

If the land is not free, the same may be said of the 
possession of it. On attempting to analyze the law, we shall 
see not only that there are different qualities inherent in the 
land but also peculiar ways of holding it, and different 
grades as it were of ownership. We must discriminate 
between : First, freehold estates and estates less than 
than freehold. Second, estates in possession and estates 
in expectancy, which are forms more or less limited of ab- 
solute property. To understand the first point, it will be 
necessary to go back to the Conquest. The Conqueror 
had rewarded his companions by ceding to them portions 
of his immense royal domain. He created military bene- 
fices, which gradually became hereditary. The great vas- 
sals imitated the sovereign and ceded portions of their 
territory by the process of subinfeudation. The allodial 
proprietors, that is, the Saxons who had not been despoil- 
ed, put themselves under feudal laws in order to be better 
protected. Thus the feudal system soon overran all Eng- 
land, establishing four different kinds of tenures, and the 
lands were thus classified under four categories, according 



^6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



to the nature of the services rendered by the tenant to the 
one of whom he held. First, if the service was military 
and noble (servitium militare), the fief was equivalent to 
our Jief d'haubert. Second, there were lands held by free 
socage, where the tenant, although still a freeman, owed 
non-military services. Third, tenure by pure villenage. 
Fourth, tenure hy privileged villenage. These four tenures 
were gradually reduced to three. First, military tenure 
or knight service. Second, free socage. Third, tenure by 
villenage was transformed into the holding which has 
acquired the name of copyhold. 

Until the end of the seventeenth century, the great 
part of English land was occupied by tenants of the first 
class. At first the possessor of the fief owed at least forty 
days of service a year. The estate was not free, but passed 
by right to the heir, who was the eldest son if there was 
more than one. During minority, the lord of the fee was 
the legal guardian, kept the land, and disposed of the rev- 
enues without having to render account, could dispose of 
the vassal in marriage or compel the purchase of his con- 
sent, had a claim to ransom when a prisoner, a gift when 
his eldest son put on spurs or his eldest daughter was 
married, aids, reliefs, fines, escheats, etc. After reaching 
his majority, the tenant could alienate the land, but the 
lord lost none of his rights as regarded the new possessor. 
Military services were gradually converted into assess- 
ments. From the time of Henry II., people began to pay 
escuage. When the king made war, he levied an assess- 
ment upon all the proprietors. King John, however, 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA C Y. 



97 



pledged himself in Magna Charta not to demand escuage 
without the consent of parliament. All these feudal bur- 
dens, so oppressive and so numerous, that had fastened 
themselves like a leprosy upon tenure by knight-service 
were not definitively abolished until the restoration, when 
Charles II. sought to recompense the cavaliers who had 
remained faithful to the royal cause. The act which abol- 
ished military tenure and its consequences deserves cer- 
tainly as important a place as Magna Charta in the history 
of England. 

There remained then only free-socage and villenage. 
The free-socage estate has become the modern freehold. 
Military services were, from the very nature of the contract 
of knighthood, indeterminate. The tenure by free socage, 
less noble, was in reality more fortunate, more akin to true 
property. It was burdened only with fixed services, days 
of work due to the lord, rents payable in money or in kind. 
During a minority, the wardship did not belong to the lord 
but to the relatives of the minor. Hence marriage was 
less under restraint. At the present day, almost all the 
land in England is held by freehold tenure. The feudal 
services have been abolished. The freehold estate is still 
attached by an ideal bond to the lord par excellence, the 
sovereign, but it is subject only to an impost, and no longer 
owes anything to an intermediate suzerain. 

Side by side with these freehold estates are the copy- 
hold lands. To understand aright this form of tenure, we 
must picture to ourselves what is called a manor. A high 
baron, lord of the manor, kept for himself his own estate, 
5 



98 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



a sort of private property, and distributed the rest among 
his vassals, \{\'$,free tenants. But this private estate being 
often too large to be utilized by the lord himself alone, he 
reserved only a part of it, distributing a second part to his 
villains^ while a third part, uncultivated, served for road 
vi^ay and pasturage for the lord and his tenants. The vil- 
lains, dwelling in villages, held their lands by the good 
will of the lord. At first they could be dispossessed. They 
rendered the most menial services ; they belonged to the 
land, and not the land to them. But gradually their ten- 
ure became consolidated and depended less upon caprice. 
Prescription gave it a sort of fixity. Every lord of a manor 
had his court. The custom of this court was the protec- 
tion of the villains, they became tenants by virtue of the 
roll, or copy of the roll, of this court, whence the expres- 
sion, copyholders. Villenage lasted until the reign of James 
I. The villains themselves, as persons, became free, but 
the statute of Charles II., which liberated /r^^ holders from 
feudal services, maintained the existence of copyhold ten- 
ure. The descendants of villains, although owners as 
matter of fact, still held their lands only by compliance 
with the custom of the manor. 

At the present day, the obligations imposed by" this 
form of tenure are reduced to a minimum. Still, some of 
them do remain. Generally the rules of transmission are 
the same as for freehold estates, but occasionally there are 
exceptions. The lord of the manor still retains a sort of 
right of superior ownership. This right extends, for in- 
stance, to mines, whatever is under the soil, even to trees 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY, 



99 



planted by the tenant. The latter cannot make a lease 
for more than one year without the consent of the lord. 
In reality, the tenant has only a right of occupation founded 
upon custom. Each new tenant, whether by inheritance 
or by purchase, pays to the lord a fine for the change. 
Each manor has it own custom with regard to rents, reliefs, 
etc. There are some manors where the lord has a right to 
seize, at the death of the tenant, his best animal (heriot). 

Parliament has permitted and even facilitated as much 
as possible the complete enfranchisement of ancient villen- 
age tenures. The rights of the lord can be bought off 
either at the lord's or the tenant's option. The propor- 
tion of copyhold estates to freeholds, then, must be con- 
tinually diminishing, since no new ones can be created, the 
very essence of the tenure being custom and a relic of an- 
cient servitude. We can thus foresee the moment when all 
English lands will have the same legal quality, so to speak. 
But, after having spoken of estates of freehold and less 
than freehold, we must take up estates in possession and 
estates in expectancy, for there are not only lands of two 
classes, but there are also different ways of possessing one 
and the same land. 

Feudal ownership was in reality nothing but an ususfruc- 
tus. But the nobility did not rest satisfied long with such 
a precarious tenure, which aggrandized the suzerain at the 
expense of the tenant. Their instinctive efforts were 
directed towards establishing hereditary property, replacing 
feudal ties by family ties. T\iQ fef taill'e.feuduin talliatum^ 
estate-in-tail, was established to this intent. It created a 



100 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

sort of property appertaining to the family. Each succes- 
sive possessor, the wearer of a great name, guarded it as a 
deposit, and the law, by surrounding it by safeguards and 
restrictions, protected it against the caprices and whims 
of the individual. The will of each generation found itself 
imprisoned, as it were, between the will of the generations 
preceding and the rights of the generations to come. Such 
estates were placed under the watch and guardianship of 
the dead. The famous act entitled de donis conditionalibus, 
passed in the reign of Edward I., was a victory of the aris- 
tocracy over royalty. It consolidated the tenures of great 
families by giving predominant authority to the wish and 
intentions of the founder of the estate. This wish must be 
complied with secundum forman in carta doni expressam. 
That is to say, whatever transfers might be made, the 
estate shoulc^always devolve upon the heirs of the body of 
him who had received the fee, or, in case there were none, 
should revert to the heirs of the donor. The rights of 
inheritance and reversion were thus absolute, fixed, inde- 
pendent of every transfer, every lease, every arrangement 
made by the possessor of the estate. This statute gave 
the family a firm seat, attached the aristocracy to the soil. 
But the inconveniences of the measure were not slow in 
manifesting themselves. Farmers were dispossessed q\ 
their farms, because leases made with the tenant-in-tail 
were not considered as binding beyond the life of the les- 
sor. Otherwise it would have been easy, by means of 
long leases, to defeat the heirs-in-tail. Creditors had no 
longer any security for recovering their debts. The stat- 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY, \q\ 

ute de donis facilitated also rebellion ; for an estate-in-tail 
could not be confiscated, but only sequestrated during the 
life of the tenant condemned for high treason. 

A shrewd king eluded the law which had conferred 
exorbitant power upon the landed nobility. He permit- 
ted sham suits to be instituted between the representatives 
of the donor and the donee, by means of which an estate- 
in-tail might be converted into an estate in fee-simple. 
This operation was called barring the entail. It put an 
end to all the rights of succession and reversion. The 
immunity of entailed estates from confiscation was also 
destroyed in the reign of Edward IV., who took it away 
from the nobility and thereby rendered revolt less easy. 
In the reign of Henry VIII. a second method of fictitious 
procedure was invented, which facilitated the alienation 
of estates by permitting the possessor in certain cases to 
despoil his heirs or the heirs of the donor of the privileges 
given them by the statute de donis. Still later, the crown 
laid hands upon entailed estates for the recovery of debts 
due to it, and finally, at the present day the law permits all 
the creditors to sell the property of a debtor in bankruptcy. 

The old fictitious procedures for liberating entailed 
estates are no longer followed. The tenant can acquire full 
property, can free himself completely, by a simple act regis- 
tered in the proper way. This power, however, is rarely 
without some qualifications. The manner in which the 
family protects itself against the individual is this. A 
man of wealth wishing to fix his name to an estate, a 
father marrying off his son, does not ordinarily deed away 



102 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

the property. He makes what is called a settlement. 
By the terms of this settlement the son gets a life-estate, 
the grandson a remainder-in-tail. The son has the enjoy- 
ment of the usus frudus. On attaining his majority, the 
grandson may, with the consent of his father, (or any per- 
son whom the first donor has designated as protector of 
the estate), break the entail and reenter into full ownership 
with all the rights thereunto pertaining. But ordinarily 
this liberty is made use of only to make a new settlement, 
with estate for life, remainder-in-tail, which may be enfran-, 
chised in turn, and so on. There is thus a periodic 
succession of estates in possession. The chain that links 
the generations together is not perfectly rigid, but it 
binds strongly enough to prevent the land from slipping 
too rapidly and readily from a single hand. 

I have described the custom. It is the offspring of 
ancient rights. The union of family and land is still so 
close that the land is no sooner free than it seeks of its own 
accord fresh servitudes. This periodic enfranchisement 
itself would perhaps not be carried out but for heavy 
charges which the estate has to meet, such as the pen- 
sions of widows, sums to be paid to daughters and 
younger sons. A partial alienation becomes necessary 
from time to time, but it can be effected only when the 
estate has become for a moment perfectly free. It has 
been estimated that these charges use up an estate in 
about three generations, if there are no outside revenues, 
that is to say, if marriages, salaries, commercial profits, and 
speculations do not supply the family with fresh capital. 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



103 



The law is at the present time less conservative than 
custom. It favors alienation of the soil. There is no 
longer any legal way of consolidating an estate (i. e. sus- 
pending ownership) for a longer term than a life in being 
with a supplementary period of twenty-one years. An 
estate cannot be limited to the children of a person not in 
being at the time. An estate can be limited only to per- 
sons in being and the children of such. No amount of 
generosity, no amount of foresight, can tie up property 
for two generations not in being. The right of dispos- 
ing of property by will is complete as soon as one is 
possessed of property free from entail. Still, we have seen 
how custom gives freedom to the estate only to take it 
away again. A single wish is no longer binding on all 
generations for centuries ; nevertheless this wish descends, 
so to speak, from generation to generation, renews itself, 
revives, and binds together successive generations. The 
right of primogeniture, introduced into England by the 
Normans, has become so profoundly a matter of habit that 
it is rarely belied by the freedom of testamentary disposi- 
tions. When an owner dies intestate, the law gives the 
entire state to the eldest son. But this is a very rare 
case. The practice of making wills is universal. Paternal 
dispositions, far more than the law, consecrate the privilege 
of primogeniture. Landed property is the visible sign of 
power, the most stable and most coveted form of wealth, 
the one most clothed in respect, associations and prestige. 
The family clings to it as the ivy clings to the wall. The 
younger sons, damaged in their material interests, console 



104 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

their imaginations with the growing greatness of their name 
and the sacrifice that they make to the family. They are 
not heard to complain. In youth, they are too generous ; 
in age, too proud. A sort of equality with what is greatest 
consoles them for inequality of fortune. For the nation, 
the right of primogeniture is the force that tears young 
men away from easy idleness, drives them out of the 
country, sends them off to distant colonies, forces them into 
activit3^ Hence labor remains something dignified. It is 
not altogether necessary, as in other countries, that to be 
a man of the world one must be a nobody. One of the 
things that surprises a foreigner is to see that the right of 
primogeniture, which formerly had its enemies in England, 
no longer has any, at least, any professed enemies. By 
force of law and custom, landed property has acquired in 
England a solidity which it does not posess perhaps in any 
other part of the civilized world. So far from becoming 
subdivided, it is concentrating itself in fewer and fewer 
hands. 

The laws of Henry VIII. were aimed at those who 
contrived to diminish the share of the people ; they 
defended the poor man. They fixed a limit for the number 
of sheep on certain lands, in order that pasturages might 
not be multiplied. They contended against the mercantile 
spirit, that wished to treat English soil as its prey and 
extract from it the greatest profits. Parliament seeing the 
Isle of Wight becoming depopulated — a portion of the realm 
so much exposed to attacks from France — prohibited large 
farms there (under Henry VII.). This prohibition was 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



105 



extended subsequently to the whole realm. " No one shall 
take more than one farm, when the revenue exceeds ten 
marks." The small farms were restored, the plough set 
to work once more upon lands given up to troops of sheep. 
" Your shepe, says Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, " that 
were wont to be so meke and tame, and so small eaters, 
now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and 
so wylde, that they eate up, and swallow downe the very 
men themselves. They consume, destroye, and devoure 
whole fields, howses, and cities. For looke in what partes of 
the realme doth growe the fynest, and therfore dearest woll, 
there noble men, and gentlemen : yea, and certeyn Abbat- 
tes, holy men no doubt, not contenting them selves with the 
yearely revenues and profytes, that were wont to grow to 
theyr fore fathers, nor beynge content that they live in rest 
and pleasure nothinge profiting, yea much noyinge the weal 
publique : leave no ground for tillage, thei inclose al into 
pastures : thei throw downe houses : they plucke downe 
townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche 
to be a shepehowse."* 

England was not yet the land of political economy, nor 
was division of labor understood. To-day iki^ yeoman, the 
free man cultivating his own land, has almost disappeared. 
Yet those free tenants were the soldiers of the English rev- 
olution. The Ironsides, Cromwell's regiment, was made up 
of country squires mounted on their own horses. The 
petition in favor of Hampden was brought to parliament by 
a troop of mounted gentlemen of Buckinghamshire 
* Requoted from the Arber Reprint. Tr. 



I06 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

numbering some say two, others six tliousand. In the 
seventeenth century, England had a mass of small land- 
owners living on their estates, free men ready to fight for 
their liberty. These laborers were the nerve and sinew of 
the liberal protestant movement. At the present day, they 
have been dispossessed by the large owners. There is 
nothing to check this incessant absorption. The great 
fortunes made in banking or trading always consolidate 
themselves in real estate. Is it asking too little of the soil 
to be satisfied with returns of two, or two and a half per 
cent ? The soil is not so avaricious. It yields other and 
inestimable profits, in the shape of public consideration, 
parity with all that is most respected, local influence, author- 
ity, judicial functions, political power. Dingy offices of the 
city, mines dug down into the bowels of the earth, docks 
that gather in the products of the world, reeking factories, 
the thousand ships that plough the sea, everything pays 
tribute to old English soil. What feats of activity it has 
cost to perfect so many noble country-seats, where, within 
the calm of the grand parks, all activity seems extinct. 
These oases of peace, this dense turf where the step of 
man dies away, these solemn trees that fear nothing from 
time, are the final metamorphosis of human energy. In 
the silent solitude of Blenheim I hear the cries of the bat- 
tle-field. The motionless and melancholy softness of so 
many beautiful places is a veil through which the imagina- 
tion can trace the stirring phantoms of the past, the strug- 
gling of eloquence, the torments of speculation, the efforts 
of labor, the sufferings of whole generations. 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY, 



.107 



The price of land is still rising, and the demand is 
always in excess of the supply, notwithstanding the inces- 
sant emigration to all parts of the world. Wealth is always 
trying to round off its estates, and agriculture on the grand 
scale, now a pure matter of business, tends to enlarge the 
farms so as to diminish the general expenses. The result 
is that the number of farmers diminishes as well as the 
number of owners. 

The rural population is divided into three classes : 
owners, farmers, hired laborers. In no other country is 
this division so thorough and so exclusive. Good or bad, 
the system has a right to the name of English. At first 
sight it strikes us as something artificial, for. it separates 
three things, the land, the instruments of labor, the arm, 
things, nevertheless, which are intimately connected and 
which supplement one another. Still, it answers as a sort 
of ideal to economists and they offer it without hesitation as 
a model. They believe it to be more favorable than any 
other to large returns ; it puts agriculture on a level with 
manufactures. 

The taxes upon land are light. The law, made thus 
far by owners, has always dealt kindly with it. Down to 
recent times the law showed a marked preference for large 
holdings. For estates exceeding one hundred thousand 
pounds, the tax on transfers was fixed and not in the ratio 
of the value. Since 1850, however, it has been adjusted 
to that ratio. Parliament has fixed it at ten shillings on 
one hundred pounds, or one half per cent. Property, then, 



I08 EKfGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

loses almost nothing by changing hands. The taxes on 
inheritances are as follows : 

For the son, daughter or other descendant 

in direct line i per cent. 

For brother, sister, and their descendants . 5 " " 
For the brother, sister of the father, moth- . 

er, and their descendants . . . 5 " " 
For the brother or sisters of grandfather 

or grandmother ; . . . . 6 ," " 
For any other grade, or persons not 

relatives lo " " 



11. 

The English aristocracy is founded, then, upon wealth. 
Its power is not merely, like that of nobilities strictly so 
called, a power existing by and in the imagination. What 
gives it strength is property, and of all forms of property 
the one most vigorous, the one least easily shaken; not 
empty names, fictions, symbols. Beneath the ideal appear- 
ance there is a firm resisting texture. The barbarian spirit 
has always respected strength, possession, success j it has 
regarded property as the true guaranty of liberty. Can he 
be free who has to hold out his hand } How does it come 
that the Anglican church feels itself independent of indi- 
viduals, local administration, state agents.? Because it 
has property. Its estates are under the protection of the 
state, we may even say in the discretion of the state, but it 
does not receive a salary, strictly speaking. Why are the 
dissenting churches independent 1 Because they possess 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA C Y. 1 09 

houses, churches, revenues. We can say the same of the 
universities, schools, corporations, associations of all kinds 
The House of Lords may be considered as proprietary 
for the aggregate of domains attached to the peerage is a 
sort of treasure belonging to it. Without the right of 
property, there is no lasting independence. 

Protestantism also has' had its share in attaching the 
English race to the possession of earthly goods. England 
was the first of European nations to recognize the power 
of money, the first to have sound finances. Political econ- 
omy, the science of wealth, has found here its Promised 
Land. Catholicism had made of poverty a virtue and 
pointed to heaven as the only conquest worthy of human 
ambition. It gave up the earth to religious orders, who 
let it lie barren. Poverty is still in Latin countries almost 
a sign of sanctity, an earthly grace. The narrow path that 
leads to heaven can have only stones and thorns. What 
are the brief joys of life, its ephemeral triumphs, by the 
side of the infinite delights, the boundless consolations of 
faith that forgets itself in obedience and plunges as it were 
into the depths of hope, and pardon, and heavenly riches ? 
Faith dulls the springs of vulgar ambition, extracts the 
sting of covetousness, chills the instincts of the animal man. 
When a Catholic country begins to worship wealth, this is 
a sign that it is approaching its decline. 

Quite different was the spirit of the Reformation. 
Protestantism is the religion of effort, and he who is capa- 
ble of effort of thought readily becomes capable of all 
material efforts. By giving conscience its freedom, prot- 



no ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

estantism gave it also a taste for struggle. It said toman 
Think, act. Hostile to weakness, idleness, self-abnegation, 
protestantism thrusts man out into life, not as a victim but 
as a combatant. The kingdom of Christ must be estab- 
lished here below, a doctrine must not be tardy in bearing 
its fruits. The best men, those who are in possession of 
the truth, the saints, must also be the strongest, the most 
capable, the most fortunate, — let us not mince words the 
richest. Poverty is only a sign of sloth. The acquisition 
of wealth betokens effort, the victory of man over his pas- 
sions ; it is the consequence of economy, order, life accord- 
ing to rule. Religious societies that are the offspring of 
liberty have a love of order that borders on tyranny and that 
astonishes Latin carelessness. This apparent contradic- 
tion has manifested itself at Geneva, in Scotland, England, 
Northern Germany, the United States. As soon as man 
constructs his faith for himself, he becomes more hardy in 
all his enterprises. Will always follows power and power 
win. 

iEngland soon ceased, then, to despise wealth. It was 
not regarded as a danger but a protection. People per- 
suaded themselves that liberty could not do without riches. 
The English aristocracy is not guided by any profound 
political calculation in assimilating to itself all the great 
fortunes and attracting all the marked talents. It only 
follows an untouched and ingenuous barbarian instinct. 
Confronted by some new force, it seeks not to destroy but 
to get possession of it. It is naively fond of success. 
The Anglo-Saxon spirit is a loadstone always turning the 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA CY. i\\ 

positive pole towards power, fortune, success, and even 
chance. It exalts whatever is rising, strengthens whatever 
is strong ; it does not idly contradict fate. It surrounds 
its favorites with a halo of unqualified admiration, deifies 
its heroes, never sees any spots-in its sun. It has less. of 
envy and at the same time less of generosity than the 
Latin spirit. This latter comforts weakness with pity 
and wounds greatness with irony. Its vanity gives the lie 
to facts, annuls and insults them. A certain sly perversity 
estranges it from causes too victorious and triumphs too 
complete. A certain nobility of mind attracts it to illusive, 
imaginary grandeurs, chimeras whose shattered fragments 
are borne away by relentless time. England does not like 
to overthrow its idols, she displays them before mankind 
and tries to make them seem even greater. She takes 
everything in a matter-of-fact way and does not have to 
make the least effort to admire what is fortunate and 
strong. 

In France, men pay court only to whatever is more 
powerful ; in England, they pay court to everything that is 
powerful. Whatever rises above the middle classes is 
immediately absorbed by the aristocracy. Hence the 
latter is constantly becoming rejuvenated, a little of the 
Anglo-Saxon blood is being continually mingled with the 
Norman. The aristocracy is like a forest, where the 
trunks lose their dead limbs and bring forth each year 
new branches. A nobleman's daughter is not degraded by 
marrying a man without a title. Within the same family, 
some members have a title which confers political privi- 



112 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL, 

leges, others a simple title of courtesy, others again no 
title at all, no prefix to the name. New men wear ancient 
titles, very old families are without title. Rank is sought 
after, but wealth still more. Nobility a-begging is some- 
thing not understood. The delights of the imagination are 
of little value, detached from the pleasures and advantages 
conferred by wealth. There are patricians but there is no 
patrician race. The grand English lord does not resemble 
the Spanish grandee, in whose veins there no longer flows 
anything but a slender thread of " blue blood," any more 
than he resembles the ennobled valets of an absolute 
government, ante-chamber generals, boudoir favorites, a 
sordid, mendicant, venal tribe. 

Not everybody can become a nobleman in England ; 
only to the rich is it possible. But, then, every one can hope 
to become rich. If wealth does not always lead to honor, at 
all events it is the surest road. The possession of a cer- 
tain number of unencumbered acres seems to every English- 
man the most natural title to the peerage. The peers 
nominated by Lord Palmerston, the Earl of Derby, or Mr. 
Gladstone, like those of Mr. Pitt, are large land-owners. 
The union of aristocracy and wealth has became even more 
intimate in our days. However noble one may be, one 
must be rich. Railroads, commerce, industry', produce too 
many fortunate parvenus, who must be coped with. Could 
one have read fifty years ago in a newspaper this paragraph : 
*' The Earl of L. having been raised to the Scottish repre- 
sentative peerage, retires from the banking-house of M. M.; 
he is succeeded by his son, Lord K. . ." (1866) ? To-day 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA C Y. 



113 



the sons of dukes become bankers, engineers, and mer- 
chants. 

The aristocracy finds that it is no longer rich enough. 
Nepotism is no longer so shameless, so scandalous as in 
times past, although birth is still the best qualification for 
the army, the navy, the church, all government offices. 
But wealth is the only road that leads to power. The mil- 
lionare steps from his counting-house into parliament. 
When he has made his fortune, he can aspire to the honor 
of representing his country. He consults the election 
agents. What are you ready to pay ? is the first thing 
asked. With open hands he comes to some borough or 
county and scatters money broadcast. He is bled in a 
thousand ways, for charitable purposes, church repairs etc., 
etc. There are some deputies who expend several thou- 
sand pounds in getting elected, and who continued to pay 
a sort of annual tax of one or two thousand. Is that too 
much, if they only succeed in working themselves into the 
aristocratic penumbra, introducing themselves and families 
into the old families of the county and the whirlpool of the 
capital ? 

It does not take long to discover that the mantle of old 
nobility covers at the present day a plutocracy. One who 
has no fortune cannot make pretensions to any thing, 
either to social esteem or to distinction. People refuse to 
believe in merit that does not know how to obtain any- 
thing for itself. Without fortune, Robert Peel, Gladstone, 
Disraeli, Bright, might have wandered all their lives out- 
side of parliament. Formerly the " rotten boroughs " 



1 14 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

were a sort of political canonicate, that a great lord could 
give to a poor relative or sell to a rich one. The Reform 
Act suppressed them. Robert Peel was the son of a cot- 
ton-spinner who died in 1830, leaving him a fortune of 
sixty millions.* This fortune placed him on a par with the 
aristocracy. At the age of twenty-one, in 1809, he bought 
a " rotten borough " that had twelve electors. English 
society is hermetically closed to poverty. Is it surprising 
that life should be for almost every one a struggle and a 
battle } We see everywhere intense effort. Strange sight 
for a disinterested spectator. So many efforts to attain 
often such petty ends, the sense of duty dragged into 
things artificial and seemingly superfluous, lives wasted 
merely in keeping up appearances, virtue, talent, genius 
itself, subjected to inexorable social tyranny. On the 
other hand, an activity that never wearies and is never 
checked, forever turning over material things as well as 
ideas, a strength that seeks rather than shuns obstacles, 
and finally these splendid works whose grandeur makes 
us forget the wretchedness and suffering of the workmen. 

The more the vague boundary line separating the aris- 
tocracy from an opulent bourgeoisy becomes effaced, the 
more eager becomes social covetousness. To be and to 
seem seek one another out, approach one another, espouse 
one another. The astonishing feature in a land of privi- 
leges is not the admiration that the rich feel for the aristoc- 
racy, but rather the naive respect which the aristocracy 
feels for wealth and which it does not seek to dissimulate. 
* Francs. Tr. 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



115 



This feeling comes from the coarse good sense of the race. 
It respects money because it knows that money is a force, 
a reality. Who shall say that a million is a chimera, a 
fictitious value, a thing to be despised t The imagination 
sees at a glance what the word contains, mansions, fields, 
luxury, authority, perhaps the peerage itself, that is to say, 
the hereditary right to govern men. 

Capital, which seems as a bond of union between aris- 
tocracy and bourgeoisy, is growing with extraordinary 
rapidity. In 1842 the tax-paying income of the country 
(the income derived from houses, lands, railroad property, 
commerce, manufacturing stocks, professional gains, pri- 
vate enterprises) was three milliards nine hundred millions. 
In 1862 the taxable income was five and a half milliards. 
From 1842 toi852, a period of ten years, the taxable 
income had increased six per cent. During the next ten 
years, from 1852 to 1862 it had increased twenty per cent. 
In 1868 the taxable income exceeded ten milliards (in 
francs. Tr). What an expansion of capital ! The class 
which has it in keeping becomes every day more numerous 
and more ambitious. Everything is shifting, and growing, 
and undergoing transformation. The tide of the middle 
classes rises higher and higher. To take away from these 
souls bent upon wealth the prospect of things tangibly and 
conspicuously great would be to deprive them of life. 

England was the first to recognize the power of capital. 
She succeeded in 1750 in reducing the rate of interest to 
three per cent. See has not kept her capital locked up with 
greedy hand in things immovable, she has given it wings, 



1 1 6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

has gone in search of adventure, has taken risks. She has 
aspired in her calculations to the conquest of the universe. 
Side by side with the visible and resplendent aristocracy, 
masters of the soil and of popular opinion, there has grad- 
ually arisen another, humble at first and overlooked, 
hiding away in dingy counting-rooms and behind big 
ledgers or the brick walls of factories. Within the dull and 
restricted plain of bourgeois life, during its sombre and 
taciturn days, the soul is enkindled by visions of nobility 
luxury, power. The bourgeoisy keeps its eyes fixed upon 
the aristocracy. The aristocracy is in search of wealth. 
It serves as its patron and support, protects it. " Other 
nations have subordinated commercial interests to pohti- 
cal j she (England) has always subordinated her political 
interests to her commercial."* Commerce, like a cupping- 
glass, must draw to the English heart the blood of the 
entire world. 

In the seventeenth century a man was extremely rich 
on twenty thousand pounds a year. This was the income 
of the three wealthiest dukes, Ormond, Buckingham, Albe- 
marle. The average income for a peer was three thousand, 
for a member of the House of Commons eight hundred. 
Ministers did not shrink from any means of swelling their 
salaries. Parliamentary corruption was unblushing. 
Chancellors, Lords of the Treasury, Lords Lieutenant of 
Ireland accumulated rapid fortunes. Titles, positions, 
commissions, everything was for sale. Under James II., 
Sunderland, president of the council, received from Louis 

* Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, Book xx. chap. 7. 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. \ 1 7 

XIV. a pension of eight thousand pounds. Tyrconnel sent 
him from Ireland enormous sums, and the king loaded him 
with gifts. To-day, there are obscure bourgeois, whose 
names are never heard outside of the city or the chief 
ports and manufacturing districts, yet who are as rich as, 
richer than, the descendants of the old families. Still, 
there is no hostility between hereditary wealth and parvenu 
wealth. The class of nobles expands in proportion to pub- 
lic wealth. Pitt alone created one hundred and forty peers. 
He had too much contempt for honors not to be lavish 
with them. In his opinion, the peerage was just the thing 
for great wealth : it was only an additional vanity. To- 
day, there are not less than four hundred and sixty peers 
entitled to seats in the Upper House, and there is no con- 
stitutional limit to the number. By marriages and alliances 
the aristocracy is continually absorbing the wealth pro- 
duced by labor. The third estate, not feeling itself sep- 
arated from the nobility by any insurmountable barrier, has 
no hatred for it. Noblemen not of the peerage are mixed 
up with the third estate. Parliament has long been the 
assemblage of a mixed order, composed of noblemen and 
merchants. Financiers, lawyers, merchants find them- 
selves mixed up with men bearing the most ancient names. 
The third estate has not become, as in France, the 
enemy of the aristocracy. For, as the aristocracy has 
become more democratic than in our country, so the 
democracy has become more aristocratic. 

There is no open contest, as yet, in England between 
aristocracy and democracy. The history of the country is 



Il8 "ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

filled with the struggles between aristocracy and royalty. 
The triumph of the aristocracy was lasting and glorious 
only because it was a victory over tyranny. Under the 
first two Georges, the Whigs defended the rights of the 
House of Hanover. These defenders are in reality its 
masters. Under George IH., the Tories regain some 
influence, but only at the price of giving up their fidelity to 
a cause detested by the people. The recollection of the 
grand struggles against political and religious despotism 
serves the aristocracy as an aureole, and the nation watches, 
as from afar, this duel between parties who quarrel over 
power, offices, dignities, and patronage. It is satisfied 
with seeing royalty separated from Rome and obedient to 
parliament. It cares little whether the one party demands 
all these things as of right, or the other party purchases 
them by a trifle more deference to royalty. This deference 
is no longer anything more than courtesy. The great 
Whig families, born in the purple, transmit to one another 
political power as a heritage. They force upon the king 
ministers whom he detests. 

There is already an English people, but this people has 
only simple, elemental passions, hatred of absolute power, 
horror of Rome, jealous patriotism. As long as these 
passions are satisfied, it demands nothing further. It does 
not meddle with the political drama. The Whigs became 
the enemies of a royalty opposed to their pretensions, 
they became the champions of parliamentary supremacy. 
Still, their ministries, like those of the Tories, are patrician 
ministries. In Lord North's ministry there were only peers 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 



119 



and the elder sons of peers. North, the eldest son of an 
earl, was almost alone in the House of Commons. Pitt, 
who succeeded the coalition-ministry, was also alone in 
the lower house ; all his colleagues were peers. The 
Addington ministry, that took his place, comprised five 
peers and four elder sons. In Pitt's second ministry, his 
only associate in the lower house was Castlereagh. Polit- 
ical influence was a monopoly, a patrimony. It gave some 
additional emotions to the pleasures and intoxications of 
youth. Lord Shelburn was Secretary of State at twenty- 
nine j Pitt, Prime Minister at twenty-five. Chesterfield had 
not reached his majority on entering the House of Com- 
mons ; neither had Fox, nor Lord Liverpool. The latter 
negotiated, at the age of thirty, as Minister of Foreign 
Affairs, the peace of Amiens. 

The war with the French Revolution and the Empire 
served the interests of the aristocracy. It greatened the 
aristocracy beyond measure. It raised Liverpool and Cas- 
tlereagh, men of mediocrity, to the height of imperial glory, 
and when Napoleon fell from the summit to which his 
fatal genius had exalted him, they basked in the rays of 
Trafalgar and Waterloo, admired, dreaded, like unto 
gods. When Europe gazed with renewed astonishment 
and respect upon the representatives of so fortunate a pol- 
icy, when sovereigns themselves paid court to the states- 
men of Great Britain, could the English people remain 
insensible to these triumphs ? Royalty had had no share in 
them. England had been saved by its aristocratic parlia- 
ment, and not only saved but conducted through a 



I20 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

thousand dangers, by a will, Roman in its tenacity, to a 
pitch of power that confounds the imagination and that 
will astonish history when it considers only the extent 
and population of the British Isles. 

If the foreign policy of the English aristocracy was as 
fortunate as it was daring, its domestic policy avoided the 
mistakes that have ruined most aristocracies. It never 
forced the nation to regard it as an enemy. It never sev- 
ered openly and insolently its interests from those of the 
people, its honor from English honor. It could always 
bend so as never to break. It was never seen leaning 
wholly on one side in great conflicts of opinion. It could 
always furnish soldiers and leaders for every cause ; some 
great aristocratic name is mixed up with every movement, 
with every reform, with every political, religious and 
social struggle. It never seeks the glory of being lost, 
the feminine pleasures of a vanity that defies necessity, 
the bitter joys of defeat. It has instincts rather than prin- 
ciples, preferences rather than doctrines. It obeys tradi- 
tions rather than immutable laws. 

After the Revolution, the two parties, — one having 
overcome royalty, the other having been overcome with it, 
— were gradually transformed. The Jacobites became 
Tories. Ardent and chivalrous personal attachment to roy- 
alty was converted into cool and rational adherence to prin- 
ciples and theories of government. As to the Whigs, the 
natural defenders of the new dynasty, they had themselves 
weakened and neutralized royalty, so they accorded to it 
despotic fidelity ; it was their work, their creature, so to 



THE ENGL ISH A RIS TOCRACY. 121 

speak. Placed between these jealous and haughty 
triumphers and a questionable royalty of the most recent 
date, what could the Tories do ? They resisted centraliza- 
tion, protected the small proprietors and peasants against 
the opulent and greedy families. The insolence and 
nepotism of the conquerors, the corruption which ensues 
upon every great political revolution and which left the 
conquered comparatively intact, the lukewarmness of 
royalty, everything in short helped to lessen the distance 
between the people and a party whose principles, neverthe- 
less, were least popular. Thus there was perpetuated in 
all ranks of the aristocracy a feeling of solidarity with 
the nation, kept up on one side by the recollections of the 
Revolution, on the other by political necessity and also by 
increased rusticity, and on all sides by the continual 
diffusion of ideas and interests. One common spirit 
pervaded all these factions quarrelling for power : namely, 
to change only what it was impossible to preserve, to 
preserve whatever did not threaten immediate destruction, 
to mend rather than to tear down, always to yield in time 
to avoid the appearance of being constrained, to set off the 
spectacle of English liberty with the barren turmoil and 
lamentable downfall of nations tormented by the dream 
of equality, in short, to maintain and excite in every way 
the patriotism of the nation and lead it to see in its 
venerable constitution the safeguard of its greatness and 
the instrument of its ambition. 

These sentiments, which are never discussed but which 
have become, as it were, congenital forms of thought too 



122 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

deep to be mere calculation, have acquired the force of 
instincts. They make the English aristocracy at once the 
most supple and the most tenacious, the proudest and the 
least headstrong, the most solid and the least set in its 
ways. A twofold clientage binds the aristocracy to the 
nation, that of vanity and that of needs. All the streams 
of wealth descend toward the aristocratic sea, and the 
patricians are not under the necessity, like the Roman 
senators, of gathering around them a train of parasites. 
On the other hand, the right of primogeniture keeps the 
younger sons and their families around the head of the 
house like so many satellites revolving around a planet. 
These concentric circles of high-born wealth and high-born 
poverty run into one another and overlap one another like 
waves, and die away far from the centre. Thus the 
aristocracy is always open, in the long run, to new ideas ; 
it never opposes progress with those imaginary barriers 
which no reasoning, no compromise, is able to move. 
By laying aside one by one the several pieces of its feudal 
armor, it has lost nothing of its moral power ; it has ever 
set greater store by its political authority than its social 
prestige. Its chief concern has been less for the adminis- 
tration than the enjoyment of the English soil. The old 
Norman spirit still gets the better of Roman ambition. 
Never was there a possession more complete, less precari- 
ous, less thwarted and annoyed by the whims and supercil- 
ious interference of what is called elsewhere the State. 
We look for the State in the provinces in England, but we 
find it nowhere. Local police and justice, roads, prisons, 



THE EN GLISH A RIS TO CRA C V. 



123 



asylums, schools, everything is in the hands of the land- 
owners. People have no faith in delegated and second- 
hand powers. It is not because such and such a great 
lord is lord-lieutenant of the county that he is respected ; 
he is lieutenant of the county because he is a great lord, 
because he has vast estates and a great name. 

III. 

Parliaments have been the servants of this power that is 
based upon land and the only one visible to the people. 
The splendors of a court like Versailles have never beguil- 
ed its eye. What castles, more beautiful than royal pala- 
ces, hedged about with more dignity and an equal wealth 
of associations ! Ministers remain simple citizens. They 
go to their departments as if to business ; they are stew- 
ards, business men. Power does not put everything at 
their feet in a single day, rank, fortune, talent, beauty. 
They do not feel the intoxications of a power that is abso- 
lute although exercised in the name of a master. Pitt had 
personal designs, was consumed by a will that knew no 
confidants. By him alone was effected, for instance, the 
union of England and Ireland. But, for the most part, 
ministers, — and I include the most illustrious, — are con- 
sidered less the masters than the servants of a party, or a 
class. Walpole, Liverpool, Palmerston never invented 
anything. Walpole remained in power twenty years, with- 
out losing anything of the jovial roughness of the country 
squire, easy-tempered, indefatigable, always ready; shrewd, 



124 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



moreover, and full of resources, his chief thought was to 
keep in place ; he made England greater almost without 
knowing it or intending it. In every cabinet there are 
orators and business men raised to power, and by their 
side are other men whose mere name has brought them 
there, men more indolent and equally indispensable, men 
of more silent ambition yet equally imperious. The politi- 
cal battles of England remind us of the Homeric fights, 
where there are always two sorts of combatants, mortals 
and gods. The passions of the two are almost the same, 
the gods are sometimes vulnerable. But Trojans and 
Greeks deal each other mortal blows, and when their favor- 
ites have bitten the dust, the gods withdraw to Olympus. 
In the cabinets of this century the Atridae have been Fox, 
Perceval, Canning, Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone. There 
have been ministers daring enough to do violence after a 
fashion to their own party. Before the passage of the two 
Parliamentary Reforms, there were some who turned their 
thoughts to the great people without a voice and really 
without representation. While serving their party, the 
best of them have sought to serve the nation. But they 
have never pretended to do it otherwise than by con- 
verting their own party to their ideas. They have never 
pointed the people to parliament or the aristocracy as its 
enemy. 

" You people of great families and hereditary trusts,'* 
says Burke to the Duke of Richmond in his letter, 1772, 
*' are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, by the 
rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we bear, and 



THE E.VGLJS/I ARISTOCRACY. 



125 



flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the ground, we 
belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavor, 
yet still are but annual plants, that perish with our season 
and leave no sort of trace behind us. You, if you are 
what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that 
shade a country and perpetuate your benefits from genera- 
tion to generation." This is the same Burke who called 
the aristocracy " the Corinthian capital of English soci- 
ety." If, informing our judgment of a country, we examine 
the social ideal which it has created for itself, — and this is 
the only means of forming a correct judgment, — we must 
see what has been produced in the moral order by the 
undisputed and venerable primacy of the aristocracy. The 
social ideal of England is typified in the gentleman, a 
unique and almost indefinable apparition, the final fruit of 
the aristocratic system. What time, what struggles and 
eflbrts, what blood, what fighting it has cost to compound 
this ideal specimen of English manhood ! Like melted 
metal oozing out from masses of scoriae, this type of char- 
acter has slowly disengaged itself from the coarseness, the 
avarice, the vulgar pride of the past. 

Paley could not define, at the present day, the point of 
honor as : A system of rules established by men of the 
world to facilitate their relations with one another, and for 
no other object ; he would no longer maintain that this 
code is not violated by : Cruelty toward servants, harsh- 
ness toward those dependent upon us, toward tenants, by 
want of charity to the poor, by injustice done to merchants 
by insolvency or by refusal to pay. These words were not 



126 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

inaccurate as applied to the generation who took pattern 
after the dissolute sons of George III. ; but the triumph of 
liberal ideas has also been the triumph of moral ideas. 
The word ge?iilema?i, however, is quite old. It makes its 
appearance in the reign of Henry VI.; but it designates, for 
several centuries, a social condition rather than character. 
It has only a portion of its modern meaning, and desig- 
nates those who, without having any title, are still not 
plebeians. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
the manners of the country gentlemen were still very 
coarse. They w^ere brought up by valets, game-keepers, 
and chaplains ranking no higher than servants. They 
traveled little, and seldom left their estates. The chase 
and its uncertainties, second-hand quarrels, family spirit, 
authority as magistrate and vanity as military commander, 
kept up the spirit of independence. Patrician hauteur was 
cloaked in rude plebeian garb, new ideas had hard work 
to penetrate these heavy intellects, these material lives, 
this hereditary and almost canine attachment to the nar- 
rowest political and religious dogmas. But time, culture, 
imperious history, have gradually transformed this charac- 
ter. Without losing any of its virtues or its native vigor, 
it has shaken off its roughness. The English gentleman 
is not the French gentilhoinme. The qualities of his tem- 
perament are colder, more serious. His courage is not 
fiery, headstrong, and chivalrous ; he is always calm, he 
neither seeks nor likes extreme danger except to display 
his indifference. Neither is he th^ honjtete ^omme of the 
days of Louis XIV. He is less of a courtier, less polished. 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA CY. 127 

less easy. He never quite abnegates himself, he respects 
himself too much to put on an air of nothingness or admire 
it in others. What in the feudal baron was indomitable 
pride, has become, in the course of centuries, quiet assur- 
ance. Per contra, egotism, that sentiment by virtue of 
which a man dares to be himself, is accompanied by a 
scrupulous regard for the rights of others, a delicate 
reserve that borders at times on timidity. 

But there is no finer trait in this character than its manly 
love of truth. The soul clings to it with such intensity that 
it is imbued with it, and falsehood becomes an impossibil- 
ity. The English aristocracy is the most trustworthy, the 
most truthful in the world. A gentleman would blush at 
changing his name or usurping a title. Nor would he find 
willing dupes to so low a deceit. Nowhere has the value of 
human words been more carefully weighed. We must go 
to the English courts to study the art of giving testimony, 
and of understanding and interpreting testimony. The 
Anglo-Saxon lie is not the naive, swaggering lie of the 
Southern peoples, a lie that has no object and is tickled 
with itself. The Anglo-Saxon lie seems, even to those who 
are guilty of it, a horrible extremity. The eye never loses 
the ability to discern the light from the shade, the true from 
the false. The soul goes straight for the truth, like a well- 
aimed arrow, and swerves from its path only with great 
effort. Conventionalties, prejudices, fictions, are so many 
veils, in which the spirit envelops itself that it may not 
perceive the truth too clearly. If people proceed slowly, it 
is only because they do not like to contradict themselves. 



128 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

If a child, sa3's Johnson, declares that he has looked out of 
this window, and he has looked out of that, flog him. The 
air of freedom is fatal to deceit. To say of a man that he 
is safe^ is the best praise that one can give. The English 
gentleman has no trouble in keeping a secret. He him- 
self is a living secret. His life is woven of prudence and 
reserve. He has few confidants, he does not like to 
expose to the eyes of another the weaknesses, the contra- 
dictions, the incoherencies of his hidden life. He does 
not give himself up to the idle complainings, the indiscreet 
imprecations of the peoples of the South. We feel in 
every man the intimations of a hidden life; the heart is 
not a gate whose hinges are worn. Loves and hates are 
silent. Conscience, cased in thicker wrappings, is more 
delicate, more tender, more morbid. Words are measured, 
because words are acts. The Englishman fulfils the obli- 
gations of friendship with a scrupulous care which suggests 
too much of duty and too little of pleasure. It is the same 
with his hospitality. He owes it to himself to treat his guest 
well ; he shows him flowers, pictures, horses, everything 
that he possesses — of himself, very little. In a land of 
aristocracy, the type of the gentleman represents the prin- 
ciple of equality. The least shade of servility or flattery, 
instinctive emotion in the presence of rank or wealth, imita- 
tion, affectation are dissonances. Imitation in every shape 
is vulgar, affectation is a shock to sincerity. The utmost 
that can be tolerated is a certain kind of awkwardness 
resembling shamefacedness. But the ideal is a perfect 
equilibrium between being and appearing, between thought 



THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRA CV. 1 29 

and action, with a quiet ease that ignores even more than 
it disdains all shams, all insuldng homage, the useless lux- 
ury of vanity. Thus it is that virtue, honor, the culture of the 
mind have engendered a certain equality even in the very lap 
of privilege. Just as, in the ancient military 7ioblesse in 
France, one gentilhomme was as good as every other, so in 
English society a gentleman is a gentleman. 

You will find the gentleman in the United States as well 
as in England. Still, the glory of having produced the 
moral ideal from which the type was to proceed will remain 
with English civilization. It is not true that the aristoc- 
racy is open to all ; it is open only to wealth. There is a 
certain degree of poverty — elsewhere not to be called pov- 
erty — which throws a man out of the social category, 
thrusts him into a sort of gulf where he sinks down, 
unknown, not despised but forgotten, like a thing without 
a name, a human waif floating for awhile just above mis- 
ery. Up above, despite diversity of condition, a sort of 
equality may come into being, based upon an indefinable 
something, upon mental culture, refinement of feeling, a 
certain moral vision that joins itself to the coarser visions 
of the senses. I do not know whether we should not find 
in the upper English bourgeoisy the most perfect repre- 
sentatives of the ideal, although that ideal has been crea- 
ted in the lap of aristocratic society. Like a spot of oil 
spreading, the ideal has long since overflowed the bounds 
of the aristocracy, it has reached the wealthy bourgeoisy 
and lastly the lower bourgeoisy itself. The middle classes 
have sought to make up for what they miss by more 
6* 



130 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

finished virtues, a more intense culture, if I may use such 
an expression. In the effort they have lost somewhat of 
grace, but they gained in delicacy. The type, moreover, 
is at the present day independent. It is no longer fed 
from its ox\£\\\ ; it resembles one of those large-branched 
olive trees in which the trunk is reduced to a slender 
bark. 

The office of an ideal is to dominate reality, to serve as 
a contrast to, and at the same time a model for facts. If 
we have to accord to the English aristocracy the merit of 
having kept itself up to the mark and having always 
afforded the country models worthy of imitation, it is also 
just to hold it responsible for the evils that have ever 
attended privilege. If these evils are not more apparent 
than they are, it is because they directly affect only the 
most intelligent and most cultivated part of the nation, 
which, moreover, is fully aware of them. The idea of right 
and equality pure and simple can nofpenetrate the coat- 
of-mail of artificial notions. It is always dimmed by rev- 
erence, by fiction, by a certain sort of superstitious patriot- 
ism. It surprises us to see no one in England attack the 
right of primogeniture, that drives every year so many 
men away from their country to seek their fortunes. He 
whom the accident of birth has not favored, the bastard 
of fortune, encounters without a murmur the combats and 
vicissitudes of life. Unremitting effort ceases to be, for 
many, a sorrow, and becomes almost a need. The mer- 
chant, the banker will not pause on the road to wealth, 
they always wish to mount still higher ; they can not, will 



THE ENGLISH ARJS TO CRA C V. 131 



not rest At twenty, one is too hopeful and too generous 
to attack the right of primogeniture ; at fifty, one does not 
attack what one has defended all his life, with his lips at 
least. The pleasure of defending the right is harder to 
enjoy than the pleasure of feeling one's self superior to 
injustice, a proud and silent negative pleasure well suited 
to discreet natures. Thus, all the passions of man, the 
best and the worst, are leagued together to sustain privi- 
lege : — pride, generosity, the spirit of family and of caste, 
the need of augmenting unceasingly the prestige which 
conduces to the glory and the wealth of Old England, zeal 
for work, the need of feasting one's self with the sight, at 
least, if not the actual possession of material splendor 
and unrivaled wealth. 

Next to the sovereign, the Lords are the most exalted 
in the nation. For the crowd, for the peasant and the shop- 
keeper, a lord is not a man like every other. There is no 
other name to give to God. The respect that the barons 
once extorted by force is offered to-day as a voluntary 
tribute. There is no equality, not even in childhood. At 
Oxford, the noblemen students are distinguished by certain 
details of costume. When an Etonian goes to take leave 
of the master, he finds in the ante-room, a plate filled with 
bank-notes. If he is a plebeian, he gives ten or fifteen 
pounds j if he is titled, as many as fifty. Young noble- 
men pay the head-master every year fifty guineas, double 
the ordinary amount. A rather matter-of-fact way of trans- 
lating the famous adage, noblesse oblige. These exceptional 
privileges and obligations, which deform the natural recti- 



132 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



tude of childhood, this mass of vulgar details of precedence 
and servile pantomine_, have become matters-of-course. 
The mind is trained to voluntary admiration and naive 
adoration. The spectacle of so many lives that are only 
combats, that attain to power and wealth only through 
suffering and risk, is less attractive to the naturally sombre 
imagination than the other spectacle of well rounded, 
easy, happy life, without doubt and without fear. The eye 
gladly turns to a lamp whose steady flame never flickers. 

We find this same feeling mized up with the most 
degraded instincts in that numerous class of petty bourgeois 
who delight in races, betting, and sports of all kinds. 
What these men look for in the lord, is not the man of 
politics, the legislator, but the man of pleasure. They like 
to have him spendthrift, dissipated, a good-tempered player, 
slightly given to vice, insolently familiar in manner. The 
nouveaux riches send their sons to the public schools and to 
Oxford that they may be on familiar terms with the sons of 
the aristocracy. They encourage rather than reprove any 
extravagance that their elder sons may indulge in in good 
company. That their sons may carry off university honors 
is not the chief point ; what is expected of them, is that 
they shall bring back to the home circle names and asso- 
ciations. The sons of nouveaux riches fill the English 
universities. They set the tone quite as much as they 
accept it. Here it is that we can study at its source the 
fundamental principle of English society, to wit, the mar- 
riage of aristocracy and wealth. 

And yet, if the nobility have any enemies, it is among 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA C Y. 



133 



the bourgeoisy that they must be looked for. But not in 
the bourgeoisy that has just struggled into acknowledged 
existence ; rather in the bourgeoisy that has already a sort 
of standing and tradition of its own, receiving the rays of 
the sun of aristocracy full in the face, but acquainted with 
the nobility and its faults, and most thwarted by its privi- 
leges. Tv/o men are brought up together at the same 
school, at the same university. For the one, a title, a name 
answer for thirty years of struggle and vexation. What 
toil, what humiliations, what annoyances must be endured 
before obtaining an ecclesiastical or a secular peerage ! 
And for one fortunate scaler of Olympus, how many others 
remain down below, among the dii inferiores of finance, 
chicanery, and administration ! Business, politics, the 
labored pleasures of London society often confound peers, 
lawyers, financiers. In the long run, the man who is active, 
tenacious, intelligent, well mannered, is sure of winning 
what might be called the moral peerage. Still, patience 
has its fits of muffled rage, generosity grows weary and 
slips at times into envy. All these confused sentiments, 
engendered by the conflict of ambition and weakness and 
bracing themselves against a good fortune that is insolent 
with its sweetness and cruel in its naivety, are so many 
mute, invisible forces. This is no real danger for the aris- 
tocracy. The bourgeoisy, concealing beneath its admira- 
tion and homage instincts vaguely hostile, does not seek 
to contend with or to attack the aristocracy. On the other 
hand, the peoi3le, which does not hate the aristocracy, will 
perhaps destroy it some day. Regarding it from afar, its 



134 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

admiration has less of envy and more of tolerance. It is 
less concerned for the social prestige of the nobility than 
for its political power. Hence this prestige can survive 
the loss of the privileges. The aristocracy will retain for 
a long time the immense advantage conferred upon it by 
its landed wealth, its high culture, and its traditions. 
Powers that come of the imagination are the most tena- 
cious, and the only invincible ones ; but the political 
authority of the aristocracy is destined, without doubt, to 
grow weaker from day to day. The peers no longer play 
that ideal part which the theory of constitutionalism assigns 
to an Upper House. The weakness of their position con- 
sists in this, that they do not seem to defend justice and 
truth so much as their own interests, traditions of caste, 
rights altogether too personal. Hence their impartiality 
is laid open to suspicion and their political authority is 
weakened by the very thing that confirms their social 
authority. When the Radical party attacks the Upper 
House as injurious to the interests of the nation, then the 
Upper House will be in great peril. Even now, persist- 
ent opposition on its part to the measures of the Commons 
is not tolerated. The Lords are represented as a bridle 
upon the violence of mere numbers, popular majorities. 
That bridle will be broken, the moment it is found too 
repressive. 

For a long time the House of Lords has held only the 
second place in the government of the country. Reality 
has been stronger than fiction. Parvenu talent will always 
beat hereditary talent. Even among the peers themselves^ 



THE ENGL JSH AR IS TO CRA CV. 135 

the parvenus are the ones that make the law. The dukes 
and earls could not do without the law peers, the men of 
humble extraction and fortune. Prior to the Reform Act 
of 1832, the two houses, having a common origin, were 
really one. The peers governed the House of Commons 
indirectly, by deputy, sending to it their younger brothers 
and sons, their cousins, nephews, and creatures. Since 
then, the lords have felt their political power slipping slow- 
ly from them. They have silently promised themselves 
to yield always in time to the will of the Commons. Their 
compliance is the guaranty of their continuance. Their 
motto seems to have become : " yield in order to exist." 

The lords are not so much legislators as the correctors 
of legislation. Mr. Bright called them, on one occasion, 
" tinkers of the law." But criticism of legal measures is 
a matter, perhaps, that calls for the most varied capacity, 
and the mental structure of the Upper House is a trifle 
too uniform for this task. Everything is understood, 
judged, examined, interpreted from too exclusive a point 
of view. In matters of foreign policy, the critical capacity 
of the lords has a wider range. History and diplomacy 
are matters appropriate to those who bear some great 
historic name. But even here, pompous pride of speech 
and the evoking of grand associations are but a thin cov- 
ering for authority on the wane and traditions wearing 
away. The temperament of the Lords is more excitable, 
more warlike than that of the Commons. It seems as 
if the former were continually dreading the disappearance 
of that dream of power, of earthly might and grandeur, 



136 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



which is embodied in themselves. But our times, changing 
everything, look with contempt on long calculations. 
Moreover, threatenings are no longer becoming in those 
who do not hold the sword. The House of Commons, 
sparing of the blood and treasure of the country, is the 
sole arbiter of peace and war, and follows only the direct 
and spontaneous wishes of the nation. 

It is very doubtful whether the House of Lords can 
preserve much longer its judicial character. At this 
moment it is the highest court of appeals in the kingdom. 
It dominates the county courts and the higher courts. It 
is the lucus^ the sacred grove, that one reaches after travers- 
ing all the forests of jurisprudence. Modern logic, accus- 
tomed to the distinction between legislative, executive, and 
judicial powers, finds them incessantly confounded in the 
English constitution. The peer is an hereditary legisla- 
tor. This idea astonishes us less than the idea of an 
hereditary judge. It is easier to make laws than to inter- 
pret them. A bill comes before the hereditary legislator, 
framed by the Commons and sustained by public opinion. 
He rejects it or sanctions it. Assuredly the privilege is a 
great one, but the right exercise of it calls for little more 
than honesty and a general knowledge of the wants of 
the country, occasionally disinterestedness. But the 
administration of justice calls for very different qualities, 
an intelligence much more quickened, habits and special 
qualities not to be looked for in the first comer. Conse- 
quently, as a matter of fact, when the House of Lords 
becomes a court of appeals, it is composed only of the 



THE ENGLISH A RIS TO CRA C V. 



137 



Chancellor and the juris consults, the law peers, in a word, 
the parvenus. Still, the o.ther peers have a right to sit, 
and sometimes they make use of it. This happened in 
O'Connell's case. Two of the ordinary peers brought 
about, by their votes, his condemnation. In a time of 
trouble and in a matter which would excite the multitude, 
the ordinary lords, doubtless, could no longer claim their 
judicial privileges without arousing an indignation that 
might prove facal to all their privileges. Limited, then, to 
the law peers, the House of Lords is still a poor court of 
appeals. It sits so seldom in this capacity, and at such 
irregular intervals, that it is impossible to foretell the day 
or the year when it will render its judgments, and the word 
judgment cannot be applied to its decisions without doing 
violence to language. For there are no judges giving an 
opinion. Each peer contents himself with expressing his 
views in a speech addressed to the house and couched in the 
ordinary forms. Thus the judgments of the highest court 
of appeals lose their main force ; they are only the opinions 
of a majority, balanced often by an almost equal minority. 
Finally, the jurisdiction of the House of Lords has the 
inconvenience of splitting the right of appeal. Certain 
matters go to the Lords, others — more numerous — go to 
the Privy Council. Explain, for instance, why appeals 
from the English ecclesiastical courts belong to the Privy 
Council, but those from the Irish ecclesiastical courts to 
the House of Lords, why Great Britain has not the same 
supreme court as the colonies. Amid this confusion, con- 
flicts of jurisdiction may readily arise. If one of the two 



138 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



tribunals has to be sacrificed some clay, it will be the 
House of Lords. What still protects it is party jealousy, 
for the acting Chancellor selects the judges in the Privy 
Council, and gives the preference in political questions to 
his partisans, whereas the judicial committee of the Upper 
House, being permanent, seem to give assurance of more 
impartiality. Ceasing to be an ordinary court of appeals, 
the House of Lords will doubtless continue to be the high 
court of political justice. Nothing could be imagined 
more solemn, more tardy and procrastinating. A great 
advantage when passions run high. Remember the famous 
trial of Warren Hastings ! 

It is a conceded principle that the Lords shall relinquish 
to the Commons everything relating to finance. The 
budget is, in reality, not an ordinary law. The impost is a 
voluntary gift made by the nation to itself. It hands it 
over to the executive power and regulates the employment 
of it by means of the organ of the elective chamber. 
Hence it is that the Lords cannot amend the budget. If, 
notwithstanding, it is sent to them and also submitted to 
the approval of the Crown, this is only to avoid giving it 
an exceptional character in its form. As a matter of fact, 
the elected mandatories of the people have alone the right 
to dispose of the treasures of the nation. The Lords, how- 
ever, although they cannot amend financial measures, can 
reject them, as also the sovereign can oppose his veto to 
every bill. 

Peers can be tried only before the House of Lords on 
charges of high treason and felony. For simple delicts 



THE ENGLISH ARIS TOCRA C V. 



139 



and misdemeanors, they are amenable to the ordinary tri- 
bunals. It can not be said of them that they have this or 
that privilege; in reality they have but one, the peerage. 
But can any greater privilege be imagined than the hered- 
itary right to govern men ? 

Everything in England is undergoing transformation. 
How might the House of Lords be transformed ? The 
idea has been started occasionally of creating peers for 
life. This innovation has never met with much favor. A 
House comprising two categories of peers would be too 
much divided in case of conflict between the two, would 
be too dependent on the Crown if the life-peers should 
get the upper hand. If the latter should come to be 
dependent on the hereditary peers, the House would gain 
nothing by the triumph of birth over talent, eloquence, and 
great services rendered to the country. The most radical 
minds do not go, as yet, very far in the way of reform. 
Some wish to hav^e representative peers of England, just 
as there are already representative peers of Scotland and 
Ireland. In every county of England, for instance, one or 
more might be elected among all the hereditary peers of 
the county to exercise legislative functions for a given 
period. It is hoped that this will restore to the House of 
Lords the life and activity in which it is now deficient. 
This problem of the Upper Chamber is one of the capital 
difficulties of parliamentary government. Still, it will not 
be brought clearly before the country until the electoral 
reform shall have produced all its fruits. At this moment 
there is no real divorce of Commons and Lords. 



CHAPTER IV. 
The House of Commons and Farliamentary Government 

THERE is no more august assembly than the English 
parliament ; its name ranks with that of the Roman 
senate. It has been the cradle of modern liberty ; the 
laws, regulations, and forms of " parliamentary" govern- 
ment have been adopted by all civilized countries. The 
whole world, knows what these words mean : motion, reso- 
lution, amendment, budget, order of the day. Rome has 
made the grammar of civil law ; England, the grammar of 
politics. She has taught Europe, America, Australia, the 
whole world to know and envy a certain ideal of govern- 
ment that makes force the handmaid of reason, surrenders 
power to intelligence, that, by reconciling the needs of the 
present with the rights of the past, prevents revolutions by 
reforms, that checks all impatience and bridles every 
ambition. 

The history of the English parliaments is lost in the 
night of feudalism. The early ones remind us of those 
gatherings that Tacitus has described in writing upon the 
manners of the Germans.* The Magna Charta of King 

* Mox rex vel princeps, prout setas cuique, prout nobilitas, prout 
decus bellorum, prout facundia est audiuntur, auctoritate suadendi, 
magio quam jubendi potestate. 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 141 

John did not create a veritable national representation. 
It called to the royal council, together with the bishops 
and the peers, only the tenants of the crown. It says 
nothing of elections, or representation, or cities, or bor- 
oughs. Under Henry III., John's successor, there is 
already a true representative parliament. It is born in 
the shade ; the old historians scarcely take any note of 
these assemblages. The parliament convenes in London, 
Jan. 22. 1265. The letters of convocation order the sheriff* 
to choose and send two knights for each county, two citizens 
for each city and two burgesses for each borough of the 
county. Under Edward I. (12 72-1 307), there were twelve 
parliaments, attended by knights, proprietors, and bur- 
gesses. The king made use of them in all his enterprises, 
notably in procuring the sanction of the murder of David 
of Wales and in subjugating Scotland. The parliament of 
1327 was strong enough to depose Edward II. In his reign, 
doubtless, was effected the delinitive separation of the 
Upper and the Lower House. The great feudal council is 
organized after a fashion, the roles are divided. Under 
Richard II., the Commons are no longer satisfied with 
voting the impost in a lump ; they vote sums for specified 
purposes. In this reign and the following (Henry IV.), 
parliament meets nearly every year. Erom the end of the 
thirteenth century, then, the Commons are a recognized 
organ of the English constitution. The sovereignty de 
facto is already with parliament. But at that time the 

^ The sheriff is the Noi-man viscount of each province, or Saxon 
shire, called by the Saxons shire-reve. 



142 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND S0CL4L. 

attitude of parliament toward royalty is defensive rather 
than aggressive. When parliament, Sept. 30. 1399, pro- 
claims the deposition of Richard II., the Duke of Lancas- 
ter steps up to the vacant throne and utters this formula : 
" In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I, Henry 
of Lancaster, do challenge this realm of England, and the 
crown, with all the members and appurtenances ; as that I 
am descended of the right line of the blood, coming from 
the good king Henry III., and through that right that God 
of his grace hath sent me, with help of kin, and of my 
friends to recover it ; the which realm was in point to be 
undone by default of governance, and undoing of the good 
laws." This said, Henry seats himself on the throne. 
Royalty recognized parliament as its judge; parliament 
punished the king without punishing royalty. The wars 
of the Roses, however, strengthen the royal power by 
destroying the great families. Under the Tudors, the 
Commons become humble and servile. Still, Henry VIII. 
could write to the Pope : " The discussions of the English 
parliament are free and without restriction. The crown 
has neither the right to limit the debates nor to control the 
votes of the members." 

By the end of the fifteenth century the kings of all the 
countries in Europe had contended successfully against 
their aristocracies: Ferdinand of Aragon, Ferdinand of 
Naples, Louis XL, Henry VII. It seemed as though the 
same causes must produce everywhere the same effects ; 
but monarchy, although becoming more absolute, did not 
assume everw/here the same features. The House of 



PARLIAMENTAR V CO VERNMENT. 



143 



Commons was the accomplice rather than the slave of the 
sanguinary despotism of Henry VIII. Under the Tudors 
as under the Plantagenets, parliament preserved its essential 
privileges, it continued to fix the amount and the nature 
of the impost. The passion of the king and the passion 
of the nation had the same objects in view. Henry VIIL, 
the most absolute king that England has ever had, unwit- 
tingly gave to parliament omnipotence. What could be 
prohibited or impossible for a body that had deposed and 
branded queens, confiscated a fourth part of the lands in 
the kingdom, changed the established religion, condemned 
innocents, changed several times the order of succession 
to the throne ? There was nothing that it had not been 
called upon to do. Then it could do everything. 

During the reign of Elizabeth, national fervor and 
religious excitement made of the queen an idol. Her 
arrogant caprices, her disdain of constitutional forms — still 
imperfectly defined, moreover — were forgiven. It was only 
under her wretched successor that the memorable strug- 
gle began which was to make parliament the victorious and 
the final master of the destinies of England. The history 
of this struggle will always be the grand epoch in English 
history. Nothing will eclipse its tragic glory, neither the 
Revolution of 1688, nor the struggle with the French Rev- 
olution and Bonaparte. 

Parliamentary liberties are like strong roots firmly 
planted in the soil. The tree may have been often abused, 
the branches and even the trunk broken, but the stump is 
still there. Three great principles underlie all the events 



144 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



principles ill defined at first, often disputed, but always tri- 
umphant. First, the king can make no laws without parlia- 
ment. Second, he can raise no imposts without parliament. 
Third, if the laws are not executed, the agents of the king 
are responsible before the courts. Henry VIII. is obliged 
to yield when he attempts to impose a tax on a sixth of 
the revenue ; Elizabeth yields when the merchants revolt 
against the monopolies that she tries to create. Comines, 
even, boasts of the English constitution, its limited, mod- 
erated royalty.' 

Charles I. indulges in the dream of a Latin, a Roman 
royalty, by divine right ; his theologians deny the contract, 
the pact between royalty and the nation. From 1629 to 
1640, although he had accepted the "petition of rights," 
which was the confession of the obligations of the sovereign, 
Charles I. did without a parliament. The one which he 
convoked in 1640 became the " Long Parliament." It 
struck first Laud and Strafford, and then, when the king 
thought to have five of its members arrested before its 
eyes, among them Pym and Hampden, it took its revenge 
on the king himself. The revolution, at first on the defen- 
sive and conducted in the name of the constitution, soon 
overthrew parliament itself. Cromwell, having become 
Protector, made an electoral reform, new Commons, a new 
Upper House. But these Houses neither were, nor ever 
seemed to be, free enough. At the moment of the Restora- 
tion, the universal cry was, " free parliament." Cromwell's 
electoral reform was judicious, but it was the work of vio- 
lence. After him, people went back to the old parliament. 



PARLIAMENTARY GO VERNMENT, 



145 



The idea of reforming the parliamentary system was not 
popular, nor was it to become so until our century. Eng- 
land was content with its Commons, whatever might be 
their origin. Did they not hold royalty in check ? Did 
they not make, in 1688, a defensive revolution that gave 
final satisfaction to all the passions and interests of the 
country ? So long as the predominating passions and 
interests are represented in a government, we can say of it 
that it is representative. According to the sense which 
we attach to the word in modern times, the English gov- 
ernment was not representative in the last century ; it is 
just beginning to become so. In its constitution we find 
this fundamental principle : not men are represented, but 
corporations, legal persons, cities or counties. One dep- 
uty is equal to every other, but one elector is not equal to 
every other. In the Act of Henry VI., there is no mention 
of any sum of population. Even to-day there is no ratio 
between the numbers of those who elect and those who 
are elected. 

The early English parliaments were, in reality, diets 
of the great feudatories or their delegates. The cities 
were represented in their quality of free cities. A free 
borough had a small bit of soveregnity, free from customs, 
tolls, bridge-money, royal charges, and administered by a 
guild of merchants. It had by charter the right of holding 
fairs and markets and raising taxes. The right of sending 
members to parliament was considered onerous, it was the 
price of municipal liberty. Representation was often a 
privilege little sought after. The crown could give and 
7 



146 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

withdraw the electoral franchise; Henry VIII. and Charles 
II. made a great number of these boroughs so-called 
election boroughs. Often it was the sheriff simply who 
selected the electoral cities. This exorbitant privilege 
of the crown did not cease until the reign of Charles II. 
There was no fixed rule for the distribution of the electoral 
right even in the district itself. In some, all the freemen 
were electors; in others, only the members of corporations, 
mayors and municipal councillors. 

This system, so rude and so arbitrary, was the final 
expression of feudalism ; it left the power with the owners 
of the soil, the great families. Most of the deputies rep- 
resented, directly or indirectly, the triumphant aristocracy. 
At the close of the last century, Leeds, Birmingham, and 
Manchester were not represented, but the Duke of Nor- 
folk elected de facto eleven deputies, Lord Linsdale nine. 
Lord Darlington seven, the Dukes of Buckingham and Rut- 
land each six. There were in Galton seven electors, in 
Tavistock ten, St. Michael seven ; seventy deputies repre- 
sented almost nobody, ninety represented in round numbers 
fifty electors each, thirty-seven represented one hundred 
each. There were two hundred deputies elected by seven 
thousand electors. Up to the Reform of 1832, three hun- 
dred deputies were elected de facto by peers, only one hun- 
dred and seventy could be considered as altogether inde- 
pendent. Macaulay is mistaken when he says, with refer- 
ence to this reform : cities have degenerated into mere vil- 
lages, villages have grown to be cities, and seems to think 
that the electoral villages, the rotten boroughs are all that 



PARLTAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 147 

remains of places once important. On the contrary, there 
have been in every age villages, hamlets and solitudes rep- 
resented as such. The famous borough of Old Sarum, 
that lost its electoral privilege in 1832, elected two dep- 
uties and had only twelve electors. What seemed an abuse 
in 1832, did not seem one in the preceding centuries. The 
Commons indeed represented England; not this or that 
village, this or that hill, with its sheep, its shepherds, its 
ploughs, but England. The political right of this epoch 
was the right of property. While all Europe was passing 
over to the rule of absolute kings, the English aristocracy 
maintained its power ; bound to the soil, it derived there- 
from its political nourishment. What did the irregulari- 
ties and the absurdities of the electoral system matter, so 
long as that system left the power with those who exercised 
undisputed sway over the country, who defended English 
honor, religion and liberty ? The great families held seats 
in parliament by the same title as their hereditary estates. 
The candidate issued from the castle with banners flying 
and music. He was cheered by the laborers. Barrels of 
beer were tapped, wooden tables spread with solid fare. 
The deputy gave his constituents a speech in which he 
exerted himself to tickle their risibilities. The election 
■was a parish wake. 

The rotten boroughs, the pocket boroughs, were politi- 
cal livings. Waller, the poet, was member from Ayesham 
at the age of sixteen. Fox entered parliament at nineteen 
as member from Midehurst, which his father. Lord Holland 
had bought for him ; at twenty-one he was taken into 



148 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIA L. 

Lord North's cabinet. Power was not yet put up for com- 
petition, the national sovereignty was not regarded as a 
treasure to be divided up exactly among all the male inhab- 
itants; two parties, both aristocratic, both armed with 
social influence, fought only for power and exercised it in 
turn. They were both suited by the same electoral sys- 
tem. People went into politics as they go into society, 
with a place marked out beforehand. The great landed 
owners could have their relatives and clients elected in 
their boroughs. This patronage was often turned to the 
profit of men of pleasure, parasites ; and yet it could seek 
out a Pitt and a Burke, a Tierney, Sheridan, Canning, 
Brougham, Macaulay. 



II. 

The old electoral system in England had the following 
results : it established a secret solidarity between the 
poHtical parties ; the one wished to give more, the other 
less to the crown, but neither was willing to give up its 
own privilege. It associated the idea of political power 
with the idea of wealth, possessions ; it gave it substance 
and inviolability, and habituated the nation to the belief 
that the masters of English soil must be masters of every- 
thing. It opposed court refinement and court corruption 
with a certain energetic, proud, jealous rusticity. It con- 
founded at a very early date bourgeois and nobles,* for the 

* The son of the Duke of Bedford, during the Wars of the Roses, 
was the first nobleman that appeared in parliament. 



PARLTAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. 



149 



5'ounger sons of the great families were returned to the 
Lower House, and even the elder sons took part in politi- 
cal affairs during the lifetime of the father. The two 
estates learned to live, argue, discuss, and think in com- 
mon. 

The third estate and the nobility, then, did not find 
themselves all at once brought face to face, as in France in 
1789, like two blind, impenetrable masses, one of which 
was to overthrow and crush the other. The bourgeoisy 
and the aristocracy were bound together by the ties of cen- 
turies ; parliament was a tree whose roots and branches 
live upon the same air and the same water. Prejudice, 
hatred, and ignorance did not raise an impassable barrier 
between the great and the people ; the governing race had 
not become a new species. Absolute power had not had 
the time nor the opportunity to create an artificial society, 
to level both aristocracy and people. The political organ- 
ization was not the work of caprice, nor of a single will, 
nor of theory, nor of system. It was the unconscious 
resultant of all the natural forces, time, the hereditary prin- 
ciple, human energy, character, natural inequalities, events. 
The strength of such a society lay in its not doubting 
itself j its religious faith had passed into its political faith. 
" The poor ye shall have with you alway." Th6 people 
had an equally firm belief in this other maxim. Lords ye 
shall have with you alway. Life was accepted as a bur- 
den, a task, a labor ; all the laborers could not work in 
the same line. What do the inequalities or even the 
injustices of a day matter to one who has the vision of an 



150 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



infinite future ? Over and above these thousand existences, 
some easy and brilliant, others dull, sombre, hopeless, but 
all ephemeral, there was upon earth one prolonged and 
durable existence, that of England. Whatever glorified 
and embellished this was good ; whatever fortified it was 
useful. The Christian idea of sacrifice is the cord binding 
together the nation as well as the family. What gifts are 
we not ready to make to the idol we call country ! Mod- 
ern politicians do not take sufficiently into account that 
the people, a child in heart and mind, has a life wholly 
imaginative ; it is the humble and lowly who take most 
delight in dreams of greatness. Why does the Breton, 
who has never seen and who will never see the tower of 
Strasburg cathedral, suffer to-day so keenly from the loss 
of Alsatia. Beyond question, there is many a peasant in 
France who would willingly barter away for that fair 
province his infinitesimal fraction of impotent sovereignty. 
As long as England waxed great, beat down its rivals, 
defied Rome and the Catholic powers, the sight and the 
sound of these conflicts filled all minds ; there was no 
room for egoistic calculations. The English political hier- 
archy would not have been respected for so many years, 
had England not been threatened by so many enemies, 
had she had only domestic needs and troubles. But her 
life was a long conquest in self-defence, in Europe and 
India, in the Antilles and Canada. If she was not a great 
power, she was nothing. If she could not make herself 
respected in every sea, she could not defend her own coast. 
Thus she became accustomed to regard the entire world 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. 



151 



as her enemy. Hence extraordinary tension, imperious 
ways, a chronic state of crisis, haste, and disquiet be- 
neath a surface apparently so phlegmatic, a disposition to 
gain its ends by using the most every-day and near-at-hand 
agents. England has always been a general more eager 
to win battles than to change the uniform of his soldiers. 

Whatever might be its defects, the English parliament 
has ever had this great merit : it knew how to govern — 
whether with the king or contrary to the king — in the inter- 
ests of the country. The corruption of the electoral col- 
leges did not infect those elected. Paley had said, the 
main point was the man elected, not the elector. From 
these elections, whether orgies, or farces, or bargains, the 
hand of the crown had long been withdrawn. A law 
passed in the reign of George II. forbids the presence of 
soldiers within two miles of the place of election^ and they 
cannot return until two days after. All office-holders 
salaried by the crown, revenue-farmers as well (Fox's Bill), 
are excluded from parliament ; a sheriff cannot be elected 
in his county ; judges are ineligible, because appointed by 
the king. The electoral lists are made out by provincial 
employees, the inspectors of the poor j the circuit judges 
select a legal board of revisers, who settle disputed points. 
The State is nowhere to be seen in all these operations. 
Neither is the State to be seen on election-day. The com- 
missioners of election are in the counties the sheriff, in the 
cities the mayor, in boroughs that have no mayor some 
leading person chosen by the sheriff. The elections are 
absolutely free ; the two parties are left to themselves. 



152 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Electoral meetings* are as free as the elections. Which 
system is the better, that which restrains liberty, or that 
which restricts the number of electors? An election is a 
sort of party-duel with established rules ; the State looks 
on as a witness. 

This system, so simple and so honest, is possible only 
where party organization is a growth of centuries. There 
are many countries that have a parliament, an Upper and 
a Lower House ; but there are few that have true parlia- 
mentary government. The peculiar characteristic of that 
government consists in bringing face to face two parties, 
one of which holds the power, the other being always ready 
to take its place whenever it commits any blunder and 
ceases to satisfy controlling instincts and interests. In 
such a government, the State is not something superior to 
and outside of parties, profiting by their divisions, deriv- 
ing its strength from their weakness, its permanence from 
their instability. The ideas of the nation are distilled into 
the electoral body, and from it pass into the parliamentary 
majority^ until, finally, they are incorporated in a committee 
called the Cabinet. Over all is the crown, indifferent, in 
appearance at least, and impartial, nothing more than the 
image of national unity. It is a great mistake to consider 
England as the country by eminence where the three pow- 
ers, executive, legislative, and judicial, are separate and 
independent. On the contrary, the legislative and exec- 
utive powers are thoroughly confounded. Such a system 
would give rise to tyranny or anarchy, were individual will 
* Caucuses, or primaries ? Tr. 



PARLIAMEN-TARY GOVERNMENT. 



153 



inordinate, ambition all-consuming and reckless of national 
interests. But, in an aristocratic parliament, the thirst for 
omnipotence, natural to man, loses somewhat of its violence. 
In other countries, parliamentary members have to choose 
between power and nothingness ; politics become a per- 
sonal matter ; people follow men, not principles or tradi- 
tions. In" England, politicians submit to a self-imposed 
discipline, the most eager ambition is regulated by obe- 
dience more or less sincere to venerable parties. One 
comes into power with his party, and expects as a matter 
of course to go out with it. One waits patiently for years, 
until the blunders of the opposite party shall lose it the 
confidence of the country and the majority in parliament. 
One has often to content himself all his life with the thank- 
less role of fault-finder. One becomes resigned to being 
nothing, is kept in the ranks of the vanquished party by a 
sense of honor. People did not invent in England the 
convenient maxim, that it is always allowable to serve the 
State. The State is never anything but one of the parties 
in power ; if it has need of servants, it has also need of 
successors. 

On the continent, the notion of systematic opposition 
has met with disfavor. The opposition in England is 
always systematic in this sense, that there is always a cer- 
tain number of men engaged in criticising the government, 
in pointing out all its errors and defects. There is a 
potential government co-existent with the government de 
facto ; the opposition has its staff, its leaders, and its dis- 
cipline. It is very certain that long continuance in power 

7* 



I 54 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

makes a party barren, takes from it its power of invention, 
its elasticity ; it becomes like a field that has need to lie 
fallow a while. Well disciplined opposition, on the con- 
trary, sharpens the faculties. One must show himself 
deserving of the power, must exercise his ingenuity, prom- 
ise the country something and never promise anything 
impossible. Moreover, in a country naturally disposed to 
respect success, there is a decided benefit in forcing states- 
men to learn to do without success ; we have not here the 
spectacle of generals, or even soldiers, deserting from one 
camp to the other, pinning the fortunes of the State to 
their own fortunes, betraying the principles that they have 
long espoused and defended in public. The human 
intellect, doubtless, can not remain forever imprisoned in 
the same formulas ; public opinion does not force states- 
men to obstinate inflexibility. But it rarely happens 
that those endowed with superior mental qualities do not 
carry off their friends with them in the direction in which 
they are led by their own reason. Fox could go over to 
Lord North, whom he had denounced for eight years as an 
obsequious minister, a patron of tax-gatherers, a pilot 
asleep at his post. But when Fox embraced the principles 
of the French Revolution and seemed to hesitate between 
his own country and France, Burke, who had fought so long 
by his side, withdrew publicly his friendship. Fox, good- 
natured and generous, tried a thousand ways of reconcilia- 
tion, which Burke always rejected. My breach with Mr. 
Fox, he writes, was a matter of principle, not a passion; I 
considered it a sacred duty to confirm what I had said and 



FA RLIA MENTA RY GO VERNMENT. 



155 



written, by this sacrifice. What would be the good of a 
passing reconciliation ? I can no longer take delight in 
him, nor he in me. — And when Burke was attacked by 
the malady that was to prove fatal to him, Fox, deeply 
touched, asked to see him. He received the following 
reply : 

Mrs. Burke presents her compliments to Mr. Fox and 
thanks him for his kind inquiries. She has communicated 
his letter to Mr. Burke, and informs him, at Mr. Burke's 
request, that Mr. Burke felt the most profound regret at 
breaking off, in obedience to the voice of a duty, a friend- 
ship of long standing, but that he made the necessary sac- 
rifice ; that his principles remain unchanged ; and that, in 
the little time he has left to live, he considers it his duty 
to live for others and not for himself. Mr. Burke is con- 
vinced that the principles he has endeavored to uphold are 
necessary to the well-being and dignity of the country, and 
that these principles can be strengthened only by convinc- 
ing everybody of his sincerity. — [Recollections of the Life of 
Fox, by B. Walpole.)* 

This seriousness of opinion has about it something ter- 
rible, almost tragic. In this matter, no doubt, the most 
vital interests of England were at stake, everything that in 
Burke's estimation constituted its grandeur and its power. 
But we may say that even in secondary matters parties 
show remarkable tenacity ; there are few men who speak 

* I regret my inability to produce the original passages. The. 
work from which they are taken is not to be found in our public, 
libraries. Tr. 



156 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

lightly of politics, as a futile subject. One must be or 
appear to be sincere and convinced. 

In the House of Lords, which takes a less active part 
in legislation, opinions are almost hereditary ; the spirit of 
the ancient families is transmitted with the blood. The 
privileges of primogeniture link together the successive 
representatives of a name, as with a moral chain. On 
quitting the universit}^, the beardless young lord takes his 
place at Westminister on the side where his ancestors sat. 
Wherein does he differ from his friend seated on the other 
side ? They have the same habits, the same prejudices, 
the same political, religious, and moral ideal, and yet, so 
long as they live, the one will vote yea when the other 
votes nay. . They feel that they are in the exercise of a cer- 
tain function, they are like weights of the same metal 
attached to the two ends of a lever ; when one goes up, 
the other goes down. 

These traditions, although in a less imperative tone, 
manifest themselves in the House of Commons. Thus 
there are always two parties confronting one another ; their 
names change from age to age, the problems of the last cen- 
tury are not those of the present. The royal prerogative, 
which was a long time in dispute, seems at the present day 
to be perfectly defined. Social questions taking prece- 
dence of constitutional. The Whigs have become Liberals, 
the Tories Conservatives ; but the turn of mind, the 
instincts and aspirations of the Tories reappear in the 
Conservatives, in a modified shape. The modern Con- 
servatives have principles of government which would 



PARLIAMENTAR Y GO VERNMEN T. 



157 



astound, in many countries, those who flatter themselves 
with being the representatives of progress. Tories and 
Whigs have the same respect for the constitution and pop- 
ular rights, the same political habits. Neither party 
dreams of usurping power, or of maintaining itself in 
power by other than lawful means, by persuasion and ma- 
jorities. You may converse for a long time with an Eng- 
lish politician before perceiving that he belongs to the 
one or the other party. We do not detect in those who 
are waiting for their turn in power that bitterness, that 
impatience, that lassitude in fidelity, or that desperate 
ardor which are to be seen in France, Spain, or Italy. 
The word "defeated" is scarcely applicable to men who 
simply retire from business. 

Still, it is a matter of astonishment that political organ- 
izations should possess such solidity and be metamorphosed 
so slowly, the more so as the oscillations which raise and 
depress a party have often been extremely slow. The 
Revolution of 1688 raised the great Whig families to 
power. The new establishment had to contend with the 
most obstinate passions ; for one half of the nation it bore 
for a long while the character of a usurpation, almost of a 
conquest. William III. had come as a master, with his 
regiments j he always continued to be his own minister of 
foreign affairs. England was not his predominating 
thought, only one of his instruments against the power of 
Louis XIV. At home, nothing could be refused to those 
who had given him the crown ; they were ruined, if they 
ceased to be omnipotent. The Whig oligarchy abused its 



158 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

victory, as all conquerors do ; it bought up parliament. 
In the times of the Revolution, the debates of the Houses 
were not published ; in fact, the voting was secret. The 
traffic in votes under the Georges was shameless. The 
Hanoverian dynasty, imported from Germany, was not 
firmly attached to English soil. Queen Caroline, more 
manly than her husband, had her moments of rebellion. 
" Do you, my lord, pretend to talk of the opinion of elec- 
tors having any influence on the elected? how 

can you have the assurance to talk to me of your thinking 
the sense of their constituents, their interests, or their 
instructions any measure or rule for the conduct of their 
representatives in parliament.""'' Caroline, brought up in 
the despotic ideas of the Continent, respected in English 
liberty only the prestige, the halo that they shed over Eng- 
land. By means of her support. Sir Robert Walpole 
remained minister twenty years ; he raised corruption into 
a system. 

The tide that had exalted the Whigs in 1688 did not 
commence to ebb until the reign of George HI. The 
Whigs were ruined by their own excesses. After the 
defeat of the Pretender, the Jacobite party had been trans- 
formed ; it had become simply the monarchical party, had 
made a mariage dc raison with the new dynasty. Its roots 
were still in the provinces, it was henceforth a national 
party, no longer turning its eyes abroad. It still supported 
the royal prerogative, but its political theories had no 
longer the character of a religious faith. The party had 
* Memoirs of Lord Hervey. 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. 



159 



ripened, as it were, for the government. The reign of the 
Whigs had lasted almost without interruption for seventy 
years, from the death of Queen Ann ; it ended when Lord 
North formed the coalition with Fox. Looking at history 
only across the summits, we may say that the Tories kept 
the ascendancy until 1832. Since then the Liberals have 
taken the lead. These great oscillations are liable to stop, 
or even to retrograde for a moment, l^ut still they are 
strong impulses that make themselves felt through several 
generations. George III. raised the Tories from their long 
disgrace. The young sovereign, more of an Englishman 
than his predecessors, felt himself also more of a king. 
The preceding reigns had served to put in practice parlia- 
mentary government ; its rules were so well established 
that the battles for the royal prerogative fought under 
George III. were but skirmishes, compared with those fought 
under the Stuarts. The Tories were now merely the king's 
friends. They treated foreign affairs with more of rough- 
ness and hauteur, domestic affairs with a more conservative 
spirit. The French Revolution alarming the entire world 
by its crimes, the Empire alarming it by its ambition, riv- 
eted, so to speak, the Tories in power. The instinct of 
self-preservation acts upon peoples as upon individuals ; 
in moments of great peril, nations cling, unless their very 
instincts are corrupt, to what seems most firm and most 
solid. When everything in Europe succumbed, when the 
most formidable powers passed under the yoke of a crowned 
parvenu, England became for a moment the sole refuge 
of liberty, the only land undefiled by conquest and oppres- 



l6o ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

sion. Of what avail were the generous and pacific hopes 
of the Whigs, when the world was deHvered up to force 
and war was the last resort of honor ? The old English 
constitution, like a fortress, raised its drawbridges. 

The great conservative flood that had swallowed up 
Imperial France subsided only slowly. The Whigs did 
not actually begin to reign until 1830 ; they effected an 
electoral reform, but since then they appear to be preoccu- 
pied rather with moderating the progress of democratic 
ideas than with combating their ancient enemies. Both 
conservatives and liberals have long had only one common 
object j they seek to keep the shaping of English politics 
in the hands of the middle classes. They remain sepa- 
rated, not so much to injure one another as to avoid the 
risk of losing everything united. W^e can scarcely say that 
the one is more disposed, or the other more opposed, to 
reform. The spirit of reform is making its way into 
both. 

Outside of the old party formations, there have always 
been a few irregular factions, which, without pretending to 
form a part of the government, have nevertheless exercised 
considerable influence upon the march of events by taking 
up one side or the other, by shifting the centre of gravity, 
and by introducing'new ideas into parliament. The Free 
Traders, the Peelites, the so-called Radicals of the present 
day, have never amounted to real parties, but they have 
supplied new dogmas, theses, and doctrines. They have 
more sincerity than ambition ; they are more interested in 
the triumph of their doctrines than in their own personal 



PARLIAMENTAR Y GO VERNMENT. \ 6 1 

triumph. Thus a sort of tacit understanding is established 
between those who are in daily conflict. In countries 
where parties speak incessantly of concord, we may say 
that there is no concord; they cry peace, peace, but there 
is no peace. In England, parties never offer the olive- 
branch j they pursue, combat, rail at each other unremit- 
tingly, but their hostility is not mortal. 

Electoral reforms have not yet altered the nature of 
parliament. The Reform of 1867 was very radical, it 
augmented considerably the number of electors. But the 
constitutional ideal has not been changed. To-day, as of 
old, the member is a representative, not a simple delegate, 
that is to say, he represents interests rather than persons ; 
he is not subjected to binding instructions. Sovereign up 
to the day of election, the electoral body disappears the 
day after. Each interest seeks its electoral colleges, buys 
them, if need be. The elector transmits, after a fashion, 
a power that he does not create ; he resembles the driving- 
belt of a machine. The real power is in things durable, in 
natural or created wealth, in land, manufactures, capital ; 
the electors do little else than give it expression. The 
insurance companies, for instance, are interested in being 
represented in parliament ; they have found docile electors, 
and now control fifty seats (1867). The land, at the time 
when the Reform of 1867 was passed, had 396 representa- 
tives from counties, to say nothing of 200 from the bor- 
oughs but belonging to the class of landed proprietors. 

Land and vested capital divide parliament between 
them. Land has still the lion's share ; it can count upon 



1 62 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

500 votes. The rest belongs to commerce, mining, manu- 
factures, banks, money-dealers. Just as in society mova- 
ble fortune seems less noble than landed wealth, so in 
politics uncertain, shifting capital yields the precedence to 
the eternal, immovable capital of centuries. Moreover, 
there is no longer any rivalry between them, as in the days 
when the Corn Laws were abolished. Everybody knows 
that the richer English commerce, the richer English land. 
Profits made in the four corners of the globe will come 
home to sleep in better drained fields and meadows and 
take shape and substance in the walls of countrj^-seats. A 
thousand arms reach out like tentacles gathering up the 
wealth of the earth to bring it back to old England. The 
spirit of parliament has its tenacious traditions that survive 
all reforms. The electoral body has to submit to them ; 
the electors can only choose between two men who, behind 
different masks, have the same face. The Reform of 1832 
inured more especially to the benefit of the class of small 
shopkeepers, it gave them a numerical majority. Yet who 
would dare to say that the shopkeeper-class governed 
England from 1832 to 1867. It is content with selling its 
votes to what are called in England the governing classes ; 
it has not had any men of elite of its own, any political 
aims of its own ; at the utmost, it has had passions and 
prejudices easily satisfied. Moreover, there is no class 
more devoted to lords and aristocracy, taken more naively 
with rank and wealth, than the class of small traders. 
They are the least noble element in the nation ; the retail- 
ers are the most corrupt electors, the most complacent 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 163 

tools of electoral corruption. This corruption has been 
just as shameless after 1832 as before. From time to 
time, investigating committees look into it and follow it 
up, but the publicity of their proceedings, so far from 
checking the evil, seems only to familiarize the public 
mind with the ways of electoral venality. In the boroughs 
and counties, votes are sold to the highest bidder, Whig 
or Tory. The Liberals are no more scrupulous than the 
Tories. To carry on an election, one must secure the 
men of the law and the publicans. The parliamentary 
brokers scatter money, the publicans lavish beer ; the 
great brewers, who own nearly all the tap-rooms, are a 
power in the state. The petty trader does not consider 
himself dishonored by making ten or twenty pounds out 
of an election ; the candidate is not dishonored by buying 
for several thousand pounds the honor of making laws. 

The Reform of 1832 changed parliament very little. 
That of 1867 gave the franchise in the boroughs to every 
man domiciled for a year and paying the poor-rates, what- 
ever his rent might be. In the counties, the elector must 
pay a rent of twelve pounds. We are reduced to mere 
conjectures, in attempting to estimate the consequences of 
this new reform. The Cassandras have made the most dis- 
mal prophecies. People fear that they have given too 
many rights to numbers and ignorance. We must resign 
ourselves, says Mr. Lowe, to teaching our new masters 
the alphabet. Yet people may take courage. In the first 
place, the reform was not forcibly wrested by the people 
from the governing classes. For many years, the cry of 



164 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

reform was only a sop to popularity ; people promised it 
without desiring it. As long as Lord Palmerston's minis- 
try lasted, they knew that they could speak of it without 
danger. After his death, the liberal party, no longer sus- 
tained by his popularity, considered itself obliged to pre- 
sent a Reform bill ; but it soon raised a spirit of opposition 
in its own ranks, coming chiefly from the great families. 
These latter dreaded not so much a reduction of the vot- 
ing qualification as a reconstruction of the electoral 
districts and the suppression of their last remaining rotten 
boroughs. Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone beheld a 
portion of their own army turning against them. At the 
last moment they were seized with the fear of demagogism 
and the unknown. Had England, rich and prosperous, 
need to change anything ? Why not suffer it to enter the 
future quietly, like a vessel in familiar waters "i 

The defeated reformers organized popular demonstra- 
tions. The railing of Hyde Park was torn down one day 
when an attempt was made to prevent the meeting. This 
new force, — numbers, — that wished to enter parliament, 
showed itself in the street. The Conservative party, sur- 
prised to find itself in power, thought it necessary, in order 
to keep there, to pass itself a reform that it had rejected 
only the day before. There are scarcely any dociri?iaires in 
England ; the government takes upon itself the task of 
satisfying the country ; it does not pretend to be wiser 
than the country. The Tories, then, passed the Reform, 
just as on a previous occasion they had got ahead of their 
adversaries in the merit of the Catholic Emancipation and 



FA RLIA MEN TAR Y GO VERNMEN T. 165 

the abolition of the Corn Laws. The session of 1867 was 
not enthusiastic but resigned ; it was a question of who 
should open most widely the gates of reform. Mr. Disraeli 
stopped just short of universal suffrage. 

Myself a witness of these peaceable changes, I am con- 
vinced that the popular pressure was not so strong as to ren- 
der postponement dangerous. The people might have been 
put off, or at least satisfied more cheaply j but there was 
a desire to remove every apprehension and even the mere 
thought of a convulsion. It was perceived that the vener- 
able social edifice would be less threatened, were the con- 
cessions made by the party most attached to the past. 
The Conservatives sacrificed their principles not so much 
to their ambition as to a sort of profound and jealous patri- 
otism that seeks to spare England the trials and mortifica- 
tions of Revolution. The part played in these events by 
the aristocratic party by eminence forms a sort of secret 
alliance between those who are most enamored of change 
and those who have the most to dread from it. In every 
Radical there is a hidden Conservative. The English 
people does not look upon its nobles as enemies or for- 
eigners. When a young lord turns Radical, which 
happens frequently, he obtains the votes of the working- 
men more readily than a plebeian would. Whatever question 
of social reform may come up, education, the hygiene of 
the great cities, wages, working hours, cheap lodgings for 
the poor, public aid, the people can always see peers in 
the foremost rank of the innovators. The people is still 
attached to its aristocracy, regards it with complacency, 



1 66 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

like a father who, lost in the crowd and standing in the 
mud, sees his daughter drive by dressed for the ball. 

The new Reform has not yet changed the personnel of 
parliament. Wealth and aristocracy are still sovereign. 
The political centre of gravity has been scarcely shifted. 
As before, parliament may be called " a club of rich men." 
The admission fee is from two to five thousand pounds 
(even these figures are exceeded sometimes), and each 
reelection costs a like sum. The budget does not contain, 
and doubtless will not for a long time, any section entitled 
" members' salaries." Public opinion rejects the idea of 
a salaried deputy. The candidates, then, are exclusively 
landed proprietors, or sons of landed proprietors, men grown 
wealthy in trade, manufactures, or banking, lawyers whose 
parliamentary career swells their clientage. The title of 
M. P. is worth money to those who are in business, but it 
first requires a good deal of money to obtain it. Men of 
letters and journalists do not aspire to the honor ; it 
would be too costly a luxury. How can election expenses 
be diminished ? The more the right of suffrage is extended, 
the greater become the necessary expenses. Custom is 
mightier than law. The candidate must shower down a 
rain of Danae upon his district. He scarcely knows where 
it falls, he himself does not set about corrupting the voters j 
that is the business of his agents, who, when called upon 
for their accounts, can always produce sham ones per- 
fectly regular in appearance. The member has not the 
resource of official patronage, as in highly centralized 
countries. He has to spend his own money in subscribing 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. \ 67 

for schools, churches, asylums, monuments, games, and 
hunting. Ambition pays its tithe. Many a man will rage 
and fume at these terrible taxes, but no man is willing that 
others should be exempt ; one pays dearly for the defeat 
of one's rivals. The laws against electoral corruption serve 
only to restrict the number of candidates, for, in a hundred 
persons able to buy a seat, there are not many who will 
run the risk of having that taken away from them which 
has cost them so much. In spite of all laws, the House 
of Commons, then, will continue to be a 7ich body. No 
one is going to attend to the business for a poor or an eco- 
nomical man. If a Mill or a Gladstone comes into question, 
the electors themselves will consent to become election 
agents ; but these exceptional cases are rare. Mr. Mill 
expressed his wish to be returned for Westminister with- 
out paying anything. He was returned, but his election 
cost his friends fifty thousand francs. 

The aristocracy no longer seeks, as it did formerly, to 
govern solely with an eye to its own interests. It gives up 
whatever it considers it must lose ; yet it can not destroy 
itself with its own hands, it can not eradicate its own 
instincts. The working men, who have become electors 
by the operation of the recent Reform, do not seek, as yet, 
to elect working men as their representatives ; they do not 
even seem to have thought seriously of it. The English 
working man is not revolutionary by disposition ; his only 
wish is for reforms, and these he obtains from political par- 
ties. The agitators who flatter him win his applause ; but 
they would not dare to call upon him for his blood, they 



1 68 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL, 

would not be able to lead him on to an assault upon roy- 
alty and the constitution ; their agitator-glory, radiant in 
the halls, sinks into the shade at Whitehall. The people 
growls, and surges, and heaves to and fro, but it is still 
kept down by respect for the constitution, or rather for a 
something which is without a name in the political vocabu- 
lary but which symbolizes the grandeur of historic reminis- 
cences, the majesty of the present, and that invisible force 
that has built up England and secured its duration, its 
moral authority, its unparalleled fortune. The Christian 
idea of duty and self-denial has also its place in these 
simple hearts, that console themselves for their own insig- 
nificance by the prospect of national prosperity. They 
have not been altogether sullied by cold selfishness. The 
English people is not merely a human dust. Its wishes 
are knit together by one common cement ; in its great and 
painful exertions it demands only one thing from the State 
and the governing classes, the thing that it regards as the 
strictly necessary of human life : liberty, protection for the 
weak, helpless, and unfortunate. Socialism itself does 
not cease to be Christian ; it raises up neither Epicurus 
nor Babeuf; it has its allies in palaces and among the 
privileged classes. The English working man is not indif- 
ferent to politics, for cheap newspapers give him abundant 
pabulum ; he is often mistaken as to the power and prov- 
ince of the State, but his understanding is untainted. He 
is rather more given to admiring than to hating what is 
better than himself; his wish is rather to rise in life than 
to pull down others. 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. 



169 



As long as this is so, tlie doors of parliament will be 
closed to demagogues, adventurers, dangerous measures. 
There is something in Anglo-Saxon roughness that re- 
pels flattery. The people considers those its friends who 
exert themselves to give it bread and meat and cheap 
clothing, who protect its children from industrial rapacity 
and promise to give them better instruction. It would 
mistrust those who told it that ignorance and poverty are 
the only masters, the only legitimate judges, having the 
sole right to make and administer law. The revolutionary 
spirit has not yet crossed the threshold of the House of 
Commons, The spirit of reform finds for its agents par- 
ties perfectly organized, who relieve each other in power 
like gangs of workmen in a mine. The House remains 
even at this day, the model of political assemblies. Its 
presiding officer has the gravity and impartiality of a judge. 
It has no written code of proceedings ; hoary precedents 
answer for laws. It knows the value of time. Its work is 
enormous, for it governs the greatest empire in the world. 
Compare it with other assemblies where the less the work, 
the more the talk, where whole days are given up to idle 
words, theoretical discussions, quarrels. The assemblies 
of less experienced countries do not know how to make 
use of their power, especially at the start. They are dis- 
cursive, they stick fast in the mire of rhetoric ; they resem- 
ble an army that does not know how to manoeuvre and 
runs to and fro without falling into line. Complicated 
regulations, reports, the discussions and intrigues of bu- 
reaux waste their time. In England, parliamentary action 



170 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

is more manly. Every motion is brought directly before 
the House and defended there, on each reading, by the 
mover himself; it does not pass through the mysteries of 
bureaux to reappear transfigured in some theatrical report ; 
it is addressed to a government, to a chamber prepared for 
every discussion, to parties who know how to come to a 
decision, and are not reduced to the necessity of first 
hunting themselves up. Parliamentary functions have less 
resemblance to acting a part. There are not two phases 
to every discussion, one in secret and one in public. The 
clubs, it is true, serve as a sort of parliamentary ante- 
chamber, where future discussions are prepared for and 
future action agreed upon. In grave emergencies, the 
leader of a party will even convene his adherents in his 
own house ; but all the great debates before the Commons 
are none the less direct and spontaneous. The parties 
have no need of learning their lessons beforehand. 

Drawn for the most part from the aristocratic caste, 
the House of Commons is still very republican in its man- 
ners. The standing of a member does not turn on his 
wealth or on his name ; only on his talent, or rather on 
his character. There is no servility ; we feel that there is 
a sort of political equality resembling the social equality 
that puts all "gentlemen" on an equal footing. The Com- 
mons do not always lend a " willing ear," but they never 
refuse it to a tried servant of the nation, or to a maiden 
effort. After the lord, the M. P. is the most exalted man 
in the country. What dignity can outrank that of a legis- 
lator 1 We must not be astonished at parvenus opening 



PARLIAMENTAR Y GO VERNMENT. \ y i 

with a golden key the doors of Westminster. Once a 
member of parliament, the nouveau riche is the peer of 
any man ; he becomes the " Honorable Friend" of all that 
is most illustrious. He is the visible exponent of national 
power j he floats upon the current of grandeur, is bathed 
in a nimbus of light ; he is sovereign. The people was 
displeased when its " Great Commoner," Pitt, became, in 
1776, Lord Chatham. The sovereignty of the Commons 
is the most live, the most active, the most complete. The 
great orators retire to the exile of the Upper House only 
when they feel their ardor dying out, themselves consumed 
by their own fire. Then they look from afar, often with 
envy, upon those combats in which they no longer have 
a share. 



III. 



Parliament, says Blackstone, has absolute power and is 
omnipotent. The familiar saying is that the House of 
Commons can do everything but make a man a woman, or 
a woman a man. It is very certain that parliamentary 
power has no well defined limits. The functions of the 
sovereign have never been defined, and parliament is a 
sovereign in three persons, the King, the Lords, the Com- 
mons j of these three persons, the first two are at present 
the least active. Every law must have the sanction of the 
Lords and the King. But royalty never withholds it 
when the two houses are agreed, and the Lords always 



1/2 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL, 



yield in time to the will of the nation as expressed in the 
Commons. 

The Crown has never been despoiled by law of its 
ancient prerogatives ; in theory, its authority is almost 
unlimited. There is no written constitution obliging it to 
take its ministers from parliament or to dismiss a ministry 
unacceptable to the chambers. The ministers are ministers 
of the Crown ; the cabinet is a royal council. Judges exer- 
cise their office solely by virtue of a royal patent that can 
be revoked at any time. The king appoints the commander- 
in-chief of the army j even the army itself is his army. No 
action can be brought against the sovereign. He governs 
the established church, the Convocation is only his coun- 
cil. Ecclesiastical supremacy in the days of Henry VIII., 
Elizabeth, James L, and Charles I., gave the king absolute 
authority over the church, which was exercised through 
the medium of a high court of commission, that punished 
all ecclesiastical delicts and became, under Laud, an 
object of terror to the nation. Who would recognize to- 
day in the remains of the ecclesiastical courts (the Court 
of Arches) the court of high commission ? 

Nothing has been changed in the words, everything in 
the substance. Royalty is an antique fa9ade covering 
modern buildings. The right of veto still exists, but since 
the beginning of the eighteenth century parliament has 
never once heard the formula : le roy / avisera. Surrounded 
by the circles of the aristocrac}', like the sun with its planets, 
royalty still remains for the people the visible image of the 
nation. The regards of men are fixed more readily upon 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 



173 



men than upon ideas; but when those men are the represent- 
atives of ideas, regard becomes a sort of religion. The 
simple words the king, the queen, awaken in the breast of the 
Englishman all those passions which are his pride and his 
chief concern and which have passed into the fibre of 
national being. For the idea of royalty is not merely 
associated with the idea of ancient possession, of glorious 
souvenirs, of good or evil fortune shared in common. It 
is also associated with the idea of a treaty, a solemn pact 
protecting religious and civil liberty. 

This treaty still exists. It was made with William of 
Orange. The Declaration of Rights is a reminder of the 
crimes and errors that necessitated the Revolution. 
Henceforth the king shall not, by exercising a pretended 
right of dispensation, suspend the operation of penal laws ; 
he shall not levy taxes without a vote of parliament, nor 
maintain a standing army in time of peace. The Declara- 
tion confirms the right of petition and electoral freedom, 
avers the freedom of parliamentary debate and the right 
of the nation to such an administration of justice as shall be 
humane and in accordance with law. All these rights and 
possessions are the inviolable heritage of the English nation, 
and the executive authority is entrusted to the new dynasty 
upon the condition that this heritage shall be kept intact. 
We must come down as far as 1830 to find anything like it, 
an open treaty between a nation and a king. In England, 
people do not speak of " divine right ; " the executive 
power is not so much a property as a function. The nation 
is faithful to the king, the king to the nation. 



174 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



The new royalty, by aiding and abetting the nation 
against the old, relinquished any and every claim to omnip- 
otence. Showing itself now more, now less exacting, it 
was led perforce to retain only so much of royal power as 
would be an obstacle to pretenders and ambitious aspi- 
rants. We still feel, after many generations, this excep- 
tional character of the English monarchy. It has not the 
manners nor the tone of continental monarchies. It does 
not speak to England as the Hapsburgs speak to Austria, 
or the Hohenzollern to Prussia, or as the Bourbons once 
spoke to France. It feels itself more identified with the 
nation and at the same time more foreign, we might almost 
say, to the nation. It has the same principles without 
having the same blood, it is united to it by interests rather 
than by instincts. It rises above parties like an arbiter. It 
is not so much a race as a magistracy. Its real principle is 
utility. " We love," says Cowper, " the king who loves 
the law." 

Since the downfall of the Stuarts, the discussions 
upon royal prerogative have been only household quarrels. 
The monarchy no longer said : To be or not to be ; it 
argued and bargained. The last devotees of royalty were 
the so-called " friends of the king," under George III., 
who did not go to court but who attacked the administra- 
tion in the name of the sovereign, with whose secret plans 
they claimed to be acquainted. In reality, it was their own 
plans that they defended. Lord Bute was the last favor- 
ite. George III. liking him, made him all at once Secre- 
tary of State, Bute delivered his first speech in the capa- 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO YERNMENT. 1 75 

city of prime minister; at the end of two years, weary of 
power, he retired without any apparent motive. Under 
the first two Georges, royalty was in tutelage. George I. 
was surrounded by greedy women and courtiers who pre- 
ferred money to power. George II., heavy and phleg- 
matic, suffered Chatham to reign supreme. George III., 
more of an Englishman and less of a German, more of a 
king than his predecessors, was the only one that dared to 
fight for his prerogative. There was nothing of the despot 
about him, but he took a serious view of his authority, and 
wished to shake off the yoke of the great families. He 
failed to understand constitutional fictions ; he laid as 
much stress upon the show of power as upon the power 
itself; he never permitted his ministers to be seated in his 
presence. Pitt he sacrificed to a religious scruple. His 
resistance to the projects of that statesman prevented the 
reconciliation of England and Ireland. The war with 
America was his war. As long as it lasted, he was Prime 
Minister with North. In his letters to North he is for ever 
speaking of his honor, his rights, his dignity. At times 
he threatens to fit out his yacht and return to Hanover. 
Although this personal administration of the king's had 
brought about nothing but disaster, he retains influence 
enough to cause the rejection of the India Bill, and the 
downfall of the coalition ministry of North and Fox by a 
private note written by himself and hawked around by Lord 
Temple.* The king's ally, Pitt, minister at the age of 

* His Majesty authorizes Lord Temple to say that whoever votes 
for the India Bill is not only not his friend but must be considered 



1^6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

twenty-four, fought for a sovereign who did not like him, 
and routed the great families. Nevertheless, kept in power 
by his popularity, by the blunders of Fox, and by the war 
with France, he held the royal prerogative within bounds. 
The king submitted to him without forgiving him his hau- 
teur and his genius. At last the king's insanity threw every- 
thing under the control of parliament ; it reduced royalty 
to a fiction. Although no party proposed to suspend the 
sovereign, this very respect itself enforced the suspension of 
the exercise of royal functions ; the nation loved its poor 
old king, but felt itself governed only by parliament. 

In the case of George IV., the king had been undone 
beforehand by the Prince of Wales ; his heinous alliance 
with the opposition, his notorious lawsuits, his vices, his 
secret marriage disarmed him and delivered him up to the 
power of parties. After William IV., the royal prerogative 
passed into the delicate hands of a woman ; she divested 
it of every oppressive character, making herself more and 
more impersonal. Queen Victoria, protected by her sex, 
by a spotless life and the integrity of her character, has 
played, as if without an effort, this part of supreme arbiter 
among parties which constitutional theories assign her. 
The nation perceives her rising above parties, rather 
resigned to greatness than anxious to be adorned by it, faith- 
ful to her advisers but having no favorites. Humane, 

his enemy, and, if these words are not strong enough, Lord Temple 
may use such other language as he shall judge to be stronger and 
more efficacious. — The India Bill took the government of India out 
of the hands of the Company and gave it to a commission appointed 
by parliament. 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 



177 



averse to war, she has never sided with one party against 
the other, she has never conspired against the Commons. 
She has reigned in the light of day ; she has had no 
secret diplomacy nor occult policy nor court hostile to par- 
liament. The Queen laid down very clearly, in 1852, the 
outline of what she considered the rights of the crown, in 
a note read in parliament by Lord Russell. The memo- 
randum was couched in these words : * The Queen expects 
Lord Palmerston (then chief of the cabinet) to state dis- 
tinctly what he proposes to do in a given case, in order 
that Her Majesty may know distinctly to what she is giv- 
ing the royal sanction. In the next place. Her Majesty 
expects that after a measure has received her sanction it 
shall not be changed or modified arbitrarily by the minis- 
ter. Her Majesty will be obliged to* consider such an act 
as a breach of faith toward the Crown, deserving to be 
punished by the exercise of the constitutional right of dis- 
missing the ministry. Her Majesty expects to be informed 
of whatever passes between the ministry and foreign pow- 
ers before any important decisions are reached, to receive 
dispatches seasonably, to receive documents requiring her 
signature in time to inform herself of their contents before 
signing. 

We can not call these pretensions exaggerated. The 
Prime Minister is to submit to the Queen all the important 
decisions of the cabinet, and to inform her of the principal 
votings in parliament, but the Queen takes no part in the 

* The author having omitted to cite his authority, I am unable to 
reproduce the original of this interesting note. — Tr. 

a* 



178 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

discussions of the cabinet. Political theorizers have tried 
to find in England an example of the separation of the 
three powers. But the secret of the English constitution 
is, on the contrary, the union of the legislative and execu- 
tive powers. What is the cabinet? A committee of the 
legislative assembly invested with every executive function. 
The Prime Minister is an elective and deposable sovereign 
governing in the name of the hereditary sovereign. The 
ministers are in name the servants of the Crown, in fact 
the servants of parliament. In theory, the sovereign 
chooses the members of the executive committee ; in real- 
ity, they are chosen by the majority of the Commons. 
When a ministry is overthrown, the sovereign summons 
the leader of the victorious party, who brings with him his 
friends and adherents, all those who have helped to 
gain the victory or who may contribute to its consolida- 
tion. 

The cabinet h&gzn with the cabal. The institution that 
is now regarded as the essential organ of parliamentary 
government was looked upon at first with mistrust. The 
ministers were the king's men ; in fact, they still call 
themselves Her Majesty's Ministers, for in England a 
name is changed long after the thing, while in France the 
thing is changed only long after the name. At first, there 
was no solidarity in the cabinet ; now, this solidarity is so 
close that a minister is responsible for a measure that he 
may have opposed in council. If he differs from his col- 
leagues on an important point, he can resign. The delib- 
erations of the council are held perfectly secret; no 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMEN T. \ 79 

minutes are kept. The ministers never write or speak 
about what takes place in their conferences. 

To say that the cabinet is a committee of the House 
would make it sound almost revolutionary j we should add, 
by way of correction, that this committee has no more 
binding instructions than the members of parliament 
themselves have. The mystery thrown around the cabinet 
and the solidarity of its members give it a sort of freedom 
of conscience. The majesty of the Crown is also preserved 
by these precautions. No Englishman could remain 
minister for any length of time if he were not able to keep 
a secret. 

It is well that the power of the Prime Minister, which 
might run the risk of losing its head over triumphs of elo- 
quence and popular plaudits, should take a rest, so to speak, 
and cool down amid deliberations that have no echo. 
That noisy force which breaks out in popular gatherings 
and carries away the multitude by the power of eloquence 
is not enough for statesmen ; they have need also of a 
latent force, derived from all that represents national inter- 
ests and national grandeur in their most august and most 
unalterable form. The power of the Prime Minister is a 
conquest that must be defended unceasingly ; he must not 
only overcome his political enemies but he must get the 
better of his friends, their underground broils and jealousies, 
Royalty serves him as a sort of invisible coat-of-mail ; roy- 
alty towers aloft to more tranquil heights. Itself without 
covetous desires, it can allay covetousness ; without hates, 
it can heal hatred. We must suppose it to be what it is 



l80 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

to-day, honest, sincere, true to the nation ; in that case, its 
mere presence has the gift not only of restraining ambition 
but of elevating and purifying it. 

Even should it pass for a while into unworthy hands, 
English royalty is no longer capable of successfully oppos- 
ing parliamentary sovereignty. The positive rights with 
which it is still armed, the right of dissolving parliament 
and creating new peers, can be exercised only with the 
cooperation of the cabinet, and the cabinet is derived from 
the House and can not dispense with its cooperation. In 
a grave crisis, the prime minister can dissolve an opposing 
House and appeal to the country ; but there is complete 
electoral liberty, there is no administration that could cor- 
rupt, intimidate, or cheat the electors ; the country will 
always have the last word. Everything bends at last before 
it, ministers, peers, the monarchy. 

Party organization can be strong only in a country 
where the State itself is not organized as a party, and par- 
liamentary government can not go on without party organ- 
ization. By party organization, I mean the faculty that 
men pursuing the same political object have of forming 
themselves into groups, uniting, establishing journals, pro- 
pagating their doctrines in public meetings, keeping up 
an incessant but peaceable agitation. A party is like an 
army, having its general-staff, its rank and file, its treasury ; 
the State does not interfere in the contest ; it does not 
turn its functionaries into election agents. When it sub- 
mits certain questions to the country, it does not attempt to 
answer them in advance. We shall look in vain for the 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. igl 

State outside of London ; the lord-lieutenant and sheriff 
are notables rather than functionaries. 

The surface of the kingdom is covered by a thousand 
local governments, parishes, corporations, counties ; aris- 
tocracy, wealth, land, the clergy are the only powers visi- 
ble in the county. All that we in France call the admin- 
istration belongs to them. When an election contest begins, 
the two parties, always ready, muster in all their forces. 
In a thousand ways and in a thousand places they seek to 
excite and arouse the voters. While the duel lasts, the 
State has but one mission : to maintain order. Defamation 
of public men and ministers has no other bridle than the 
common law; anger, envy, injustice, and hatred are turned 
loose. These tempests alarm nobody, they seem as inevi- 
table as the equinoctial winds. In power or out of power, 
the parties keep up their propaganda, work upon public 
opinion. Politics display a sort of theological fervor ; the 
expression does not evoke abhorrence, as in Latin coun- 
tries. Politics overrun everything ; they sit by the domes- 
tic hearth, at table, they insinuate themselves into books, 
their breath pervades everything. They are not disjoined 
from political economy, administration, the science of 
finance, as though they were something low and impure. 
Women are none the less women for having their opinion. 
The affairs of State are not the monopoly of a class of 
vendors of oaths and traders in eloquence. There are not 
two countries within the country, the one living by politics, 
the other submitting to politics, but holding itself aloof in 
disdain or disgust. A man is expected to take a deep and 



1 82 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

passionate interest in public affairs and the public weal ; 
party spirit is not looked upon as dangerous to the state, 
but as a condition sine qua non of free government. It is 
not enough to say : I wish to serve the country, but : With 
whom do you wish to serve it ? 

Such habits not only insure the most complete electoral 
freedom, but the nation is so pervaded and saturated with 
politics that an election expresses the national will in an 
almost perfect manner. It is not a sort of unforeseen sally, 
it issues from the electoral body as the fruit issues from 
the tree. We must always keep this truth before our eyes, 
in order that we may not be astonished by parliamentary 
omnipotence; the sovereignty of the House is not super- 
imposed, as it were, upon that of the nation, it is expressed 
from it. Nothing henceforth acts upon it as a restraint ; 
politicians Hve in public opinion, like salamanders in the 
fire. There is not a legislative measure that is not dis- 
cussed, commented upon, amended, and criticised from 
one end of the country to the other. Parliaments are but 
the registering clerks of the national will, or rather there 
is a constant circulation of will between principal and 
agent, between the people and its representatives. Parlia- 
ment acts upon the nation, the nation upon parliament. 
It is useless to decree that instructions are binding, when 
the nation is careless, indolent and ignorant. It is super- 
fluous, when attention to political matters is unremitting 
and universal, when politics become, so to speak, a part 
of national hygiene. 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. 183 



IV. 



There is no constitution, no written charter defining 
the powers of parliament. These powers have no precise 
limit ; they are of all sorts, religious, legislative, judicial, 
administrative. 

The present constitution of the Church of England 
dates back to the first years of the reign of Queen Eliza- 
beth ; it took up one entire session of parliament. Canon- 
ical and liturgical laws were passed like other laws ; they 
were sent, as usual, from the Conmions to the Lords. 
Two peers and five prelates voted against the spiritual 
supremacy of che Queen and the absolute exclusion of the 
spiritual supremacy of '^ every foreign prince and prelate." 
By a majority of votes, the prayer-book of Edward VI. was 
restored, with a few alterations, and heavy penalties 
imposed upon all who should attack the new liturgy. 
Parliament is not an ecumenical council, yet transub- 
stantiation was the doctrine of the church until parliament 
abolished it. What put an end to the celibacy of priests ? 
Parliament. The church being national, it is perforce 
subject to the legislative power. The church loves to con- 
sider its doctrine as a direct inheritance from the apostles, 
a trust handed down from age to age ; but the church can 
not be regarded as a simple apostolic family, it demands 
too much of the State and civil society. It possesses priv- 
ileges j has a direct share in legislative authority, inas- 



1 84 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

much as its bishops have a seat in the Upper House ; 
plays an important part in parish administration (and the 
constitution of the parishes has only been shaken by the 
reform of the Poor-Law) ; both in fact and in theory, the 
parishes still continue to be the centres of provincial 
administration. 

What is the state of the law as touching the Anglican 
Church ? ist. The law permitted a great number of 
endowments to be appropriated to religious uses? 2d. 
Permitted the Anglican clergy to keep these endowments 
upon condition of fulfilling certain duties. 3d. It sub- 
jected the clergy to a particular form of worship, to the 
doctrines of the Prayer Book and the Thirty-Nine articles. 
4th. It permits the bishops to sit in the House of Lords. 
5th. It permits them to hold ecclesiastical courts, subject 
to appeal, however, to the Privy Council. 6th. It author- 
izes the meetings of an ecclesiastical assembly called the 
Convocation, which assembly may discuss certain matters 
and, with the aid and consent of parliament, may take a 
subordinate part in legislation. Parliament, which has 
given to the church its dogmas, its constitution, its privi- 
leges, and its wealth, may modify its own work. It has 
already done away with the Establishment in Ireland and 
restored the church to the sphere of the common law. 
There is no doubt but that it might loosen one by one the 
ties that unite Church and State even in England. 

As to administration, we cannot say that it is altogether 
in the hands of parliament, for the counties, towns, and 
parishes still have very extensive administrative powers. 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT, 185 

But nothing stands between, so to speak, parliament and 
this multitude of isolated, independent, incoherent bodies. 
There are no all-powerful administrative bodies forming a 
sort of State within the State. There is no sharp dividing 
line between administration and policy. Were the cabi- 
net reduced to a purely political ministry, there would not 
be room enough for party ambition, there would be no 
way of recompensing services ; the inferior bureaux are 
the lower rounds by which young talents and new reputa- 
tions can climb. A cabinet reduced to a small number of 
indispensable men would be confronted by a skilled admin- 
istration out of the reach of political storms and much 
more preoccupied in escaping from the control of the 
Commons whenever their chiefs should no longer form a 
part of parliament. As it is, these latter serve as the liv- 
ing bond of union between the varying will of the nation 
and that tenacious and traditional will which is deep-rooted 
in every bureaucracy. 

To place by the side of ministers directors of the great 
branches of administration would be repugnant to the spirit 
of the English parliament. These personages, accustomed 
to the respectful attention and the quiet of their bureaux, 
would be swept away like dead leaves by the storms of the 
Commons. Their technical eloquence would give way 
before the nimble dialectics and the sarcasms of the oratori- 
cal gladiators. They would detest the House, and the 
House would despise them. The ministers, whose lot is 
always uncertain, would sacrifice them without mercy. It 
is the especial function of the little ministers to propitiate 



1 86 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

in time the wrath of the House. They are veritable scape- 
goats, shielding both the ministry and the bureaux. When 
the Poor Laws were reformed, an attempt was made to 
entrust the direction of public aids and charities to a purely 
administrative commission. The "three kings of Somerset 
House " had but a short reign ; they had many enemies 
in parliament and not one official defender. The commis- 
sion was dissolved and this department is now under the 
direction of a minister. 

The administration is not spoken of in England as a 
body distinct from the political body. The word is used 
in an altogether different sense. People say " Lord Pal- 
merston's administration," meaning " Lord Palmerston's 
Cabinet." In fact, the cabinet and the House represented 
by the cabinet are the veritable administration. There 
will be nothing to fear from the bureaucratic spirit as long 
as it is under the domination of the political spirit of par- 
liament. Everything relating to public education, charities, 
taxes, may be centralized more than it is ; but as long as 
the legislative power continues to be the prime motor of 
the State and the soul of the government, centralization, 
being closely united to law, will respect its forms and guar- 
anties and will not become an instrument of oppression. 
Parliament can change everything ; it can wipe out the 
feudal boundaries of the parishes, abolish the Corporation 
of the city of London, substitute prefects for lords-lieutenants, 
reform Oxford, Cambridge, and the public schools. Local 
barriers and ancient constructions subsist only by its suf- 
ferance. But its conservative instinct teaches it that it 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. jg/ 

must not transfer to others its universal right of reform. 
The Lords themselves feel this ; they concede one reform 
only to preserve the right of preventing another. 

There is no more centralized country than England, 
in this sense, that there is one central will that can do and 
undo everything, that embraces everything and is unfettered, 
that modifies itself freely from age to age, from generation 
to generation, from year to year, without ceasing to be 
sovereign. This will is sparing of its efforts, like a skillful 
workman who expends no more force than is necessary to 
obtain a certain effect. It does only what is necessary, 
and leaves undisturbed all these petty centres where, well 
or ill, social, political, and religious wants are attended to. 
It lets everything live that has life, everything last that can 
last. The Englishman takes no pleasure in destruction. 
The Lord Chancellor is still the caiicellarius ^ the keeper of 
the king's conscience ; he is the supreme representative 
of that equitable jurisdiction, a relic of barbarian times, 
whereby the king himself mitigated or set aside judgment. 
He nominates to livings and convokes parliament ; he is 
the natural guardian of minors and aliens \ he combines in 
his person the three powers : the judicial, as a magistrate ; 
the executive, as a member of the Cabinet and special 
representative of the king j the representative, as presid- 
ing officer of the Lords. When its privileges are in ques- 
tion, the House of Commons claims, and has claimed for a 
long time, the right of administering justice itself, without 
the interference of the ordinary courts. It has incarcerated 
men upon a mere order and without alleging the grounds 



1 8 8 ENGLA ND P LI TIC A L AND SO CIA L. 

of arrest. Sir Francis Burdett was arrested and sent to 
the Tower, in iSio, by order of parliament. The Commons 
can impeach and try before the House of Lords, converted 
into a supreme court, not merely ministers but all officers 
of the crown. For instance, the trial of Warren Hastings. 
In these state trials, the Commons are represented by 
three accusers ; in the case of Warren Hastings, they were 
Burke, Fox, and Sheridan. The last trial of this kind was, 
in the present century, that of Lord Melville, accused of 
malversation. 

The judicial prerogative of parliament is a weapon that 
has lost its edge j we can scarcely speak to-day of privi- 
leges of parliament, for the humblest citizen of England 
enjoys liberty of speech and person. The precautions for 
defending members against royal authority have long been 
superfluous. Hence, every time that the Commons have 
tried to claim excessive privileges, the nation and the sense 
of justice of the country have rejected the claim. The 
Commons had to yield in their attempt to prevent printers 
from publishing their debates or to deprive citizens of the 
benefit of habeas corpus and the protection of the ordinary 
courts. Wheeble, a printer, was cited before the Commons, 
in 1 77 1, to answer for the publication of parliamentary 
debates ; he refused to appear. The House offered a 
reward of fifty pounds for his arrest. Wilkes, then an 
alderman exercising judicial functions at Guildhall, acquit- 
ted the printer. Another printer brought an action against 
the House-messenger who was charged with his arrest, 
Wilkes and Oliver sentenced the messenger to give bail. 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 189 

The ministry threw Oliver in the Tower, and shortly after, 
the Lord Mayor, Crosby. The judges refused to interfere 
between the House and the city magistrates, and the lat- 
ter remained in prison until the close of the session. Since 
then, the newspapers have published parliamentary pro- 
ceedings unmolested. Nothing remains of these trials but 
the memory of them. The Commons would now hesitate 
a long while before pursuing a pamphleteer or an orator for 
contempt of privilege. Defamation of the House or one 
of its members can be punished by the King's Bench, like 
every other libel. 

It should be carefully noted that, whenever the Commons 
have abandoned any one of their ancient rights, they have 
done so in favor of the judicial rather than the executive 
power. The executive power is still parliament, for it is 
only a delegation from parliament. But it has happened 
frequently that the Commons make some concession to the 
judicial power, which exists outside of and above parties. 
Thus parliament has instituted a special court for divorce- 
cases. It has decided recently that it would no longer 
examine into elections contested on the ground of corrup- 
tion or violence, but refer the examination to the judges, 
thereby abandoning a valuable privilege and one over 
which every political assembly watches jealously. It even 
thinks seriously of modifying the entire system of so-called 
private bills. At the beginning of each session, a number of 
committees are appointed, whose principal office is to report 
upon all demands for concessions. These committees 
really sit like so many tribunals. Railway companies, dock 



IQO 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



and harbor companies, companies competing for supply- 
ing cities with gas, water, and drainage, appear before these 
committees with their witnesses and their counsel, called 
parliamentary advocates. The inquiry, instead of being 
based upon the reports of engineers, like the system of our 
learned co?iseils des mi7ies et des ponts et chaussees, is con- 
ducted by testimony and cross-questioning. Parliament 
has been struck by the evils of this system. In the first 
place, it is very expensive ; it is not uncommon for a rail- 
way company to spend forty, fifty, sixty thousand pounds 
on the inquest. If the work is to be done in Cork harbor, 
for instance, the examination is not conducted on the spot, 
but in London, and the witnesses must be brought there at 
a heavy expense. The cost of getting bills through parlia- 
ment has been a great tax upon the English railroads. 
As the railway system represents a capital of three hundred 
millions sterling, we can estimate the magnitude of the inter- 
ests discussed before the House committees. The judges 
in these parliamentary tribunals are often ignorant and 
inexperienced ; the engineers overwhelm them with science 
and the advocates with argument. Every question must 
be treated ab ovo. The jurisprudence of these numerous 
and changeable committees is necessarily uncertain and 
shifting. It has to be revised often by the standing judi- 
cial committee of the House of Lords, acting as a court of 
appeals. The committees are so loaded down with busi- 
ness and work so slowly that it has become necessary to 
give the Board of Trade authority to grant provisional 
orders for great public works. Parliament, of course, can 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. 



191 



confirm or invalidate these orders, and persons interested 
can petition parliament to have proceedings stayed. The 
plan has been proposed of referring all private bills to 
some regular court outside of parliament, but there is no 
agreement of opinion as to the composition and jurisdic- 
tion of such a tribunal. Should it be made up solely of 
judges and lawyers ? Or should they be associated with 
engineers and financiers ? Be that as it may, parliament 
seems quite ready to give up its ancient authority in the 
matter of grants, but only to such judges as shall be 
independent of the crown and the government of the day. 



V. 



It is a common mistake to suppose that parliamentary 
government is necessarily free government. The history 
of the Convention shows that an assembly may become 
the most odious and most unmerciful tyrant, because all 
sense of responsibility is lost. Is there anything more 
deplorable than so many attempts at parliamentary govern- 
ment ending only in more or less hypocritical dictatorships ? 
A House may, like a sovereign, become arbitary, violent, 
infatuated, obstinate, capricious, wild. What is the most 
powerful check upon parliamentary omnipotence in Eng- 
land ? Not the royal prerogative, not the House of Lords, 
but rather judicial authority. I have already shown how 
parliament is stripping itself of its attributes in favor of 
the judicial, not the executive power. More than this ; 



192 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



judicial authority fixes the place of each political organism 
and checks every aberration ; it serves as the 7ie plus ultra 
of whatever exercises public authority. The Court of 
Queen's Bench is a fourth power in the State ; it has the 
right of control, and prevents every usurpation, whether by 
the crown, or by the ministry, or by state officials, or by 
local officials. It took cognizance of the dispute between 
James II. and the seven bishops, and history must give 
this much credit to the king, that he did not dream of inter- 
fering with the course of justice in this celebrated case 
where his own crown was at stake. The jury was impan- 
eled as usual. What is the meaning of this institution, the 
jury, as sacred as parliament itself? It means that the 
nation, while delegating all its powers, has reserved for 
itself the right of punishing. The merchants who give 
their verdict {i^ere dictum) are the descendants of those 
barbarian warriors who administered justice and deposed 
kings. 

" The pure and impartial administration of justice," 
says Junius in his letter of January twenty-first, 1769, "is 
perhaps the firmest bond to secure a cheerful submission 
of the people, and to engage their affections to government. 
It is not sufficient that questions of private right or wrong are 
justly decided, nor that judges are superior to the vileness 
of pecuniary corruption. Jeffi-ies himself, when the court 
had no interest, was an upright judge. A judge under the 
influence of government may be honest enough in the 
decision of private causes, yet a traitor to the public." 
How are the English judges screened from the influence 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 



193 



of the government ? How is it that justice has become 
the supreme power, the chief regulator in the state ? Those 
who make the law generally look upon themselves as above 
the law ; in England, the legislator takes more glory in the 
respect paid to the law than in the power which he has of 
changing the law. Who has violated the law most fre- 
quently in France, kings or assemblies ? Our history is 
full of the outrages committed upon the law, first by the 
absolute monarchy and then by revolutionary governments. 
It was in France that the word was uttered, "We are 
dying of legality."* 

The Due de Broglie says, in his work on 2he Govern- 
ment of France, " We count our judges by hundreds and 
thousands. Hence it is that we cannot have, like our 
neighbors, a body composed of men of the first order and 
consummate jurisconsults.'* That judicial authority in 
England is so powerful, comes from there being so few 
judges. Three courts alone represent the ancient court 
of the king, the aula regia, viz. King's (Queen's) Bench, 
more especially charged with criminal causes, the Ex- 
chequer, for fiscal matters. Common Pleas, for ordinary 
civil suits. Each court has only five judges, so that 
fifteen judges, by their civil and criminal assizes, are the 
dispensers of justice for almost all Britain. To these 
Common Law Courts, however, must be added the Court 
of Equity, which supplements the common law and makes 
good its defects, by creating a sort of organic, ever- 
growing law that proceeds from the individual conscience 

\ La legalite nous iue. 
9 



194 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



of the judge. There are very few judges, then ; they 
have not their peers ; they shine with majesty borrowed 
from that of royalty itself, their dignity is as stable as that 
of the hereditary lawgivers, George III., on ascending 
the throne, decided that the justices' commissions should 
not expire with the death of the sovereign. Their salaries 
are paid out of the civil list, and consequently are not 
discussed in parliament every year, inasmuch as the civil 
list is fixed for the duration of the reign. The Lord 
Chancellor, who is Minister of Justice and presiding 
officer of the House of Lords as well as judge, receives 
five hundred thousand francs per annum, the Chief Justice 
of Queen's Bench two hundred thousand, the Chief Jus- 
tice of Common Pleas and the Lord Chief Baron one 
hundred and seventy-five thousand. The other judges 
receive one hundred and twenty-five thousand each. 
They are already rich on ascending the bench, for none 
but the most renowned and successful lawyers are chosen. 
The judge, then, has no favors to ask of the crown or the 
ministry ; he is not afraid of falling nor of not rising. 
If he is desirous of fame, he can obtain it only through 
his impartiality ; if his name is handed to posterity, it is 
only because he has become the symbol of equity and his 
acute intellect has expressed most exactly and most 
felicitously the sense of that mass of documents and rules 
called the law. He must represent something impersonal, 
continuity amid the discontinuity of human actions, the 
past amid the heaving passions of the present. 

It is very natural that the judicial power, raised in 



PARLIAMENTAR V GO VERNMENT. \ 95 

the shadow of the crown and representing the rights of 
society as against individual passion, should have con- 
tinued long to be, even in an aristocratic country, the 
jealous defender of the rights of royalty. Lord Mans- 
field, Lord Thurlow, Lord Loughborough, Lord Eldon, 
Lord Ellenborough were allies of the court. Lord Mans- 
field and Lord Ellenborough were even taken into the 
cabinet, becoming agents of the executive power. Lord 
Mansfield fried to restrict the right of the jury in suits 
for libel against the press to a simple finding of the facts. 
Not only did he draw upon himself the wrath of Junius, 
but another judge was found to combat this opinion, Lord 
Camden. This latter showed that it is impossible to 
separate absolutely matters of fact from matters of law, 
that the jury that ascertains in murder the degree of 
malice, and in robbery the degree of felony, must also 
inquire in a libel-case into the culpable intent. Lord 
Camden had the best of it, and Fox's Bill, in 1791, 
became the safeguard of the liberty of the press. 

Parliament is only one of the workmen at work on the 
edifice of the law. By the side of the written law, made 
on the spur of the moment, there is another law, the child 
of time and custom, slowly developed from the conscience 
and the brain of the judges. In nearly every instance it 
has been a suit or a trial that has established most firmly 
and most conspicuously the lasting conquests of liberty. 
For political theories do not move the heart of a nation so 
readily as such a drama, in which she sees the actors 
before her, either to love or to abhor them. Moreover' 



196 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

the English mind is disposed to venerate whatever is pow- 
erful. Now the legislator only confers power upon men 
and things, he does not touch directly, with his own hand, 
the lives and fortunes of citizens. Hence he seems less 
formidable and grand than the judge. 

Who was the first to decide that every slave on touch- 
ing English soil becomes free ? Lord Mansfield, in the 
case of a negro seized on a ship in the Thames. Who 
taught the Whigs tolerance ? The magistrates. They 
mitigated the operation of unjust laws against Catholics 
and Dissenters. The legal mind, accustomed to be 
guided by reason, is not given to fanaticism. Lord Mans- 
field, the strict conservative, the jealous guardian of the 
rights of ancient authority, was a protector of the Dissent- 
ers. He condemned the Corporation of the city of Lon- 
don, that had imposed fines upon the sheriffs whom it had 
appointed and who could not exercise their functions 
because of non-conformity to Anglican rites. It is not a 
crime, said he to the House of Lords sitting as a court of 
appeals, for a man to say that he is a Dissenter, it is not a 
crime for him not to commune according to the rites of 
the Church of England ; it would be a crime for him to do 
so contrary to the dictates of conscience (1767). It was 
the Court of Chancery that protected the chapels and real 
estate of the Dissenting sects(i844). Is it necessary to 
recall all that the judges have done for a liberty as pre- 
cious as that of conscience, for personal liberty ? Until the 
reign of George III., arrests might be made upon so-called 
general 7varrantSj that did not even designate by name the 



PARLTAMENTAR V GO VERA^MENT. 1 97 

persons suspected. When the forty-fifth number of 
Wilkes's journal, the North Briton^ appeared, Lord Hali- 
fax caused forty-five persons to be arrested. In 1762, the 
Chief Justice of King's Bench pronounced these general 
warrants illegal, and sentenced the agents of the govern- 
ment to heavy damages. Wilkes, who had been arrested 
for a moment, recovered one hundred thousand francs. 
The courts even prohibited the sweeping seizure of all the 
papers of a subject of the king ; the search-warrants must 
specify distinctly the papers to be searched for, and only 
such papers and no others can be seized. The dwelling 
of a citizen should not be pillaged. Lord Camden lays 
down this doctrine in 1765, in the court of Common Pleas. 

The Commons did not interfere in the way of legisla- 
tion in these famous litigations. While the decision rela- 
tive to the general warrants was still pending, the Attorney 
General said boldly that he "paid no more attention to 
the resolutions of the Commons than if they had been so 
many drunken porters' oaths." The resolutions of the 
House of Commons, in fact, are only expressions of opin- 
ion, without legal authority. The Commons do not claim 
the right of altering a law while it is undergoing judicial 
interpretation and application ; they cannot confer upon a 
new law retroactive force. The nation represented in par- 
liament does not defy the nation represented in the jur}^- 
box. Thus the judge finds himself raised for months, often 
for years, to a sort of Mount Sinai, high above the makers 
of the law and attracting the gaze of the entire nation. 

The prestige of the judges is not due exclusively to this 



198 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



august role ; it is not enough that their wisdom guides the 
uninformed conscience of juries and leads them to the 
truth, that their decisions become axioms handed down 
from age to age. The magistrate becomes a legislator 
without ceasing to be a magistrate. The House of Lords 
may be either a tribunal or a legislative chamber. Those 
who have watched longest over the execution of the law 
are the best correctors of legislation. The moral authority 
of the judges, then, is almost unlimited. Thanks to them, 
liberty of conscience, of person, of the press, are not mere 
words and chimeras ; these sacred rights have become as 
inviolable as the right of property, as rights purely tangible 
and material. 

The House of Commons is the living expression of 
national sovereignty. But this sovereignty is not a blind, 
capricious, childish force, tossing to and fro ; ready to 
destroy rather than do nothing. Parliament can do any- 
thing, but it is content with correcting the work of the past 
without pretending to renew it from top to bottom. Eng- 
land has yet to make the acquaintance of that baneful doc- 
trine which denies to one generation the right of binding 
another. Were that doctrine true, not only the political 
constitution but all the laws would have to be changed 
incessantly. Moreover, where does one generation end 
and the next begin ? The House of Commons is the 
motive power of England, content with overcoming by its 
patient efforts the resisting forces of tradition, custom, the 
crown, and the aristocracy. There is always a sort of 
dynamic epuilibrium of all these forces. The English 



PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT. 199 



Commons have never considered themselves as other than 
the agents of England's greatness, prosperity and safety. 
Their sovereignty always halts instinctively before whatever 
seems to threaten the country. 



CHAPTER V. 

On the Formation of Political Habits, 

I. 

IN every free country we must discriminate between 
two kinds of forces, the constituted and the organic. 
The former are the front of the edifice, and go by the 
names of executive, legislative, judicial. The king, the 
Lords, the Commons, the Privy Council, the Army are the 
outward and visible agents of national power. But this 
power is fed and kept up by forces that I call organic 
because they compose the living frame-work and are not 
the product of laws but of habits. These forces hold the 
middle place between the individual and the State \ they 
form the first degree of organization, so to speak, in the 
tissue of national will, desires, instincts, hopes, and aspira- 
tions. The sovereign and the two Houses remind us of a 
beautiful fountain bubbling up in the midst of a fair land- 
scape. But the forces of which I speak are the subter- 
ranean tubes, the reservoirs and the hydraulic machinery. 
Most theorizers upon politics have occupied them- 
selves more with the constituted powers, those powers 
whose functions may be defined by charter, than with the 



FORMATION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 20I 

inferior powers which have no place in the State but which 
are, so to speak, the supports of the State. Numerous 
experiments have shown how useless it is to confer 
representative institutions upon a nation which, by the 
operation of religion or politics, has no collective force 
left but the State. Where men are only a sort of dust 
scattered hither and thither by chance, where egoism has 
no restraint but narrow family ties, where society is not 
traversed in every direction by all sorts of chains and 
links, self-imposed obligations and servitudes, in such a 
case the State, whether it be called a king, an emperor, 
or a parliament, must incline perforce to tyranny. 

It is with political as with moral freedom ; he is most 
free who takes voluntarily upon himself the most duties. 
A people is not free as long as it recognizes no other 
forces than those of the government, no other restraint 
than that of the writ.ten law. A sovereignty that finds 
its field of operations only in the periodical and hazardous 
choice of a few legislators is little more than a nominal 
sovereignty. 

Legislation should be the expression of national wants 
and wishes ; but these wants and wishes will not be 
anything more than obscure instincts unless they can 
find throughout the entire surface of the country some 
expression, some formula, some representation. There 
are countries. in which opinion is organized, so to speak; 
other countries, in which it remains in an inorganic state. 
In the former, national will is always in activity and 
movement, like a healthy body. In the latter, the nation 



202 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

suffers rather than wills^ it does not know how to com- 
mand : the utmost that it can do is to change its masters. 

The non-constituted but organic powers that support 
the entire poHtical superstructure of England are : 
parties, the press, reUgious societies or churches, secular 
societies or corporations of all kinds. 

Party spirit is indispensable in a free State, it forms 
the atmosphere, so to speak, of liberty. It constitutes 
the first of those numerous subinfeudations without which 
society relapses into the atomic state. Party spirit is not 
revolutionary ; in the United States, England, Belgium, 
Switzerland, wherever habits of freedom exist, the par- 
ties are parties of government ; they do not seek to 
overthrow the constitution but to become its interpreters. 
They do not proscribe one another but take one another's 
place. 

Government by parties is the highest form of express- 
ing the submission of the minority to the majority. It is 
possible only in countries where it is an understood thing 
that the government is made for the people, and not the 
people for the government. It calls for the most exalted 
virtues. The self-abnegation that keeps a party together 
in constitutional opposition, as long as it cannot succeed in 
convincing the majority, shows devotion to a certain ideal 
and to political and social traditions, perpetual self sacrifice. 
It bridles ambition, spurs up indolence, drills alike the 
impatient and the sluggish. It unites one generation to 
another, carries the family spirit into politics. It is a 
religion that does not banish free inquiry, that tolerates 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 203 

sects, dissenting churches, apostles of adventure, but 
scourges hypocrisy and apostacy. 

In democratic countries, where the right of suffrage is 
almost universal, parties have need of some sort of repre- 
sentation, we might almost say, government. In the 
United States, for instance, a party has its standing 
committees for each state, county, city, towns. 

The party not in power, as well as the party in power, 
controls an army of volunteer agents. These armies are 
set in motion whenever it becomes necessary to elect a 
president, a senator, a representative, or merely a state 
governor, federal or municipal officers. The lists of can- 
didates are not the work of chance or whim. They are 
studied out, prepared, and discussed by conventions 
invested with full and regular powers. These party gov- 
ernments do not hide themselves from sight, but work in 
the light of da}', like the government at Washington. 
Their proceedings are published in the new^spapers, their 
meetings are open to the public. They have their agents, 
their orators, their peripatetic apostles, (in the West their 
stump orators), their organs, reviews, platforms. In these 
great political associations, no doubt, the sharpest wills 
and the most pushing ambitions have the chief place. 
Still these wills and ambitions must keep to certain gen- 
eral ideas, must work for others, and can not turn every- 
thing to their own profit. 

In England, party organization is not so complex, the 
government having been for so long a period almost 
purely aristocratic. Even at the present day, what we 



204 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



might term the political personnel of England is not so 
numerous as to call for party organization outside of par- 
liament. Family spirit has long remained the most solid 
link in party spirit, traditions go hand in hand with ancient 
manors. There are certain names that can not be uttered 
without evoking a world of reminiscences. It rarely hap- 
pens that the representatives of certain families do not 
accept a role that is somewhat impersonal. Hereditary 
succession transmits and developes certain ruling instincts, 
makes some families liberal, others conservative. Even 
were it otherwise, it is harder to defy the dead than the 
living, harder to contradict one's ancestors than one's 
adversaries. This fidelity to the past is not servitude, but 
we should not err much from the truth in saying that party 
spirit is almost hereditary. Young men destined for pub- 
lic life are classified and assigned to their regiments from 
the start. They recognize their chiefs and accept their 
leaders. A daring, prophetic genius will break loose from 
every rule and break down every obstacle. But the world 
is not peopled with geniuses. 

After the family, society is the strongest bond of party 
spirit. In no country have politics been permeated so 
thoroughly with the spirit of the world as in England. The 
governing classes are at the same time the polite, lettered, 
elegant classes, setting the fashion. 

Not to wear the colors of one's party would be in as 
bad taste as not to be well dressed. Young ladies know 
on which side of the house their partners in the dance 
will sit. We can not enter a parlor without finding poll- 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 205 

tics side by side with pleasure. They have their place 
everywhere*, at table, at the ball, at the country-seat ; the 
atmosphere is saturated with politics. The result is that 
the virtues of polite society have been carried into public 
life, such as trustworthiness, secrecy, reserve, courtesy, 
respect. There is no severer code than that of the world ; 
it exacts probity of speech if not of heart, a sustained 
mastery over anger, hatred, envy, all the noble and ig-noble 
passions by which we are incessantly agitated. The more 
exalted a party, the more strictly it is held to the exercise 
of such a mastery. The party-chief must become in a 
measure impersonal, must restrain himself continually, 
sacrifice his private animosities, recollections and dislikes. 
He must never, by his own mental superiority, crush out 
mediocrity, stupidity and incapacity ; his originality must 
stand the pelting shower of common-places. His predom- 
inant quality is character; his words amount almost to 
acts, he measures them. He must inspire both friends 
and foes with confidence ; he represents the typical 
gentleman, that is to say, the true man, in politics. 

I am depicting an ideal. But is it not a great deal 
that this ideal should be so high ? The party is dominated, 
from one end to the other, by this spirit of submission to a 
common cause ; the individuals regard themselves rather 
as servants than as masters. In the highest spheres, peo- 
ple do not feed upon power as if it were a prey ; they 
look upon it as a means quite as much as an end. Power 
is not worn like an idle decoration. 

It is not wealth nor even high rank that brings about 



2o6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

this disinterestedness, for we do not see them triumphing 
in other countries over excessive ambition ; -but it is a 
certain natural hauleur making a man regard himself as 
always superior to his works and unable to take complete 
satisfaction in them, and also a sort of collective spirit, 
which is called in church matters the sectarian spirit, but 
which has not as yet any accurate name in politics. 



II. 

The press is perhaps the most powerful party agent ; 
it is the representative of ideal, impersonal, traditional 
forces. The English newspaper exercises a sort of royalty 
to which there is neither regency nor minority. The jour- 
nalist is wrapped in mystery much denser than that of con- 
stitutional fictions. Unknown, his voice resounds through- 
out England and often throughout the world. He lives as 
it were in a tomb ; but do not Shakespeare and Milton from 
the tomb still charm mankind ? The newspaper does not 
charm men, but it instructs them. It is the shopkeeper 
of information and facts j it carries the reader's mind in a 
twinkling to the four corners of the globe ; it opens to the 
humble artisan every day new and boundless horizons, 
carries him to distant battle-fields, amid tempests, into 
kingly palaces, into all the great assemblages of men, to the 
prison and the hospital, and from the facts it draws day 
by day the lesson. It compares general ideas, drags man 
out of his ennui and isolation and throws open to him the 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 20/ 



world, makes him better by pointing out to him the con- 
catenation of events, firing his zeal for things indifferent to 
him, and furnishing him with unselfish cares. What art, 
what patience, what ingenuity there must be in this new 
Scheherazade that no longer counts by nights but must for- 
ever charm her master ! She has not to invent anything, 
neither does she merely recite events ; she is always ex- 
tracting from them some political moral. She is giving a 
lesson that has neither beginning nor end. She has taken 
upon herself the office of the ancient chorus. 

This impersonal character of the press is, at the pre- 
sent day, the real sign of its power. The writer is lost 
in the work. This was not the case when the newspaper 
was a small sheet, an individual and literary enterprise. 
Without fortune, without rank, Addison was sent to the 
House of Commons and became Under Secretary of State. 

We are still where England was in the last century. 
The journals of the continent remind one of those small 
country inns where the fare is generally good enough and 
the hostess chatty, but where there is an absence of almost 
everything that we should like to have. The English jour- 
nal, on the contrary, is like some great hotel where w^e 
have only to order what we want and the servants are very 
attentive but say nothing. 

Journalists are the hidden advocates of a cause ; they 
write to be read and not to make themselves known ; the 
interests of their party are the only thing that they have to 
be careful of They treat on equal terms with the highest 
powers, because they treat in the name of certain ideas, cer- 



2o8 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

tain doctrines and traditions. They are like actors play- 
ing the part of kings better than the kings themselves. 
Abroad, their representatives are ambassadors, not accred- 
ited, but almost as powerful and often more active than the 
real ambassadors. One might suppose that in a country 
of absolute liberty there must be a great many papers. 
Not so. It is only when politics become personal that 
newspapers multiply. The journalist is then a General 
wishing to command and no longer willing to obey. In 
revolutionary countries there is an incessant vegetation 
of ambitions, each one of which buds into a journal. Each 
orator, each intriguant, each coxcomb must have his organ. 
Freedom of the press degenerates into a gladiatorial pell- 
mell or still worse, into a fight among actors. In coun- 
tries that have long been free, newspapers are strong and 
permanent enterprises, kept up from generation to genera- 
tion, changing only gradually and not making unexpected 
and daring sallies upon popularity. The English journal 
is no place for romance, gossip, or mere frivolity. It is a 
powerful political and commercial machine, all iron and 
steel, dispensing with useless ornament. To construct 
such a machine, much time and immense capital are neces- 
sary. This is why there are so few great journals. What 
is there left to read, after we have read the Times and two 
or three others ? We need not be apprehensive even of 
becoming subjected gradually to opinions too uniform and 
too narrow. At first, newspapers were merely party 
organs, but at the present day, some are so powerful that 
they can read all parties a lesson. They represent a new 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 209 

function in the State : political criticism. Statesmen, from 
the very moment they get into office, run the risk of losing 
a portion of their moral power; the journal, only a witness, 
never loses its power. It watches over parties, arouses 
and touches among men in office that point of honor which 
prevents them from continuing to govern when they 
are no longer sustained by public opinion. It is always 
sounding public opinion, and becomes the echo of those 
muffled wishes that have no direct voice in parliament 
and the administration. The press is after a fashion 
a barometer, marking accurately the fluctuations, the move- 
ments, the anxieties, the gradual changes in the national 
mind. Just as our thoughts escaping from their limbo and 
fixing themselves in words become clearer to themselves, 
so opinion, which is thought myriad-minded and national, 
seeks and finds itself continually in the printed word, the 
newspaper. What conversation does in the family, the 
press does in the nation : it brings about shocks and col- 
lisions, but also explanations, understandings, general har- 
mony and intercourse. We cannot conceive of a real 
parliamentary government, that is, a government of per- 
suasion, without the cooperation of a sober, watchful press, 
keeping the mind of the nation fixed upon general matters. 
There is not in England a man so rude as not to have some 
ideas about politics, some respect for speech, for law and 
reason, some relish for courteous and loyal contest, for 
the free play of human energy and intelligence. 

New ideas and doctrines do not spread in a free country 
like widening circles in the water that start from a centre 



210 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

of movement. They are propagated rather as one liquid is 
gradually diffused in another. We do not see and often 
we do not know by what channels they make their way, 
nor even where they start from. The political atmosphere 
is changed gradually, so that in a few years it is entirely 
renewed. Even those who, from temperament, preconceived 
resolve, or interest, proclaim themselves most attached to 
old ideas, are under the influence of the new, before they 
are aware of it ; they make use of the new phraseology 
before they have entered into its spirit. We see contin- 
ually instances of this diffusion of ideas, which, by reason 
of the habit of discussion, the press, and the poHtical char- 
acter of the race, is a quick and almost irresistible process. 
Let us take up a few examples. I shall select, if you will, 
the colonial policy of England. Formerly, and even at the 
beginning of this century. Great Britain considered each 
one of its colonies as a fortress to be defended at every 
cost ; their soil was as sacred as that of England itself. 
To extend, multiply and defend them, was the statesman's 
first duty. Men-of-war were so many floating bridges unit- 
ing an immense territory of which the British Isles were 
only the centre. They did not stop short of the conquest 
of a country like India ; a handful of Europeans took upon 
themselves to rule over millions of men. We know with 
what desperation England struggled to retain her Ameri- 
can colonies and how, even at this day, she can scarcely 
forgive the United States for preferring independence to the 
honor of belonging to Great Britain. Still, the lesson 
administered by America was not lost. By a sort of a 



FORMA TJON OF POLITICAL HABITS, 2 1 1 

tacit understanding, the colonies were divided into two 
classes. Some were regarded as vast dependencies, from 
which England was to derive as much wealth as possible 
without establishing her children, her laws, her institutions, 
without making them thoroughly her own. The others, 
thrown open to a steady emigration, were regarded as 
entitled to legislative independence and a sort of autonomy. 
Wherever a Saxon population established itself, it brought 
with it its lares and penates, its institutions. It accepted 
from the mother country only the representative of execu- 
tive power, and, in return, the mother country protected it 
from attack. 

Under the protecting shadow of this regime, which is 
both independence and solidarity, the Australian colonies 
have taken their wonderful start. Canada (it was Pitt who 
permitted the two Canadas to have parliaments of their own 
choice, and, French Canada being Catholic, this was eman- 
cipating Catholics abroad before they were emancipated at 
home), Canada enjoys a degree of prosperity scarcely sur- 
passed by that of her powerful neighbors. And 3'et public 
opinion has slowly disengaged itself from this system. 
We scarcely know to whom to attribute the change ; it is 
due less to men than to the propaganda of political econ- 
omy. There is a certain school that examines the relations 
between the mother country and the colonies only from the 
debit and credit point of view. This colony cost us more 
than it yields. Another makes use of its legislative inde- 
pendence to vote a protective tariff and exclude our manu- 
factures. The necessity of protecting our establishments 



212 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

all over the globe against any and ever}' attack obliges us 
to keep a military and naval establishment ruinous to our 
finances. Our protection, for all it is distant and ineffi- 
cient, serves none the less to suppress in the colonies that 
manly feeling which is engendered when people know that 
they have none to rely upon but themselves. Commerce, 
free trade, these are the best means of preserving the 
friendship of so many far-away populations. Our authority 
over them can not but be either tyrannical or nominal, we 
do not wish it to be tyrannical. And if nominal, of what 
good can it be to us ? It becomes to us a fetter, a source 
of embarrasment, a constant preoccupation. We have 
always some war on our hands, to-day in India, to-morrow 
at the Cape, in China, or in New Zealand. The burden of 
our responsibilities is too overwhelming. The blood shed by 
a brutal Jamaica Governor recoils directly upon our heads. 
We sign treaties that dismember provinces scarcely known 
to the most learned members of the Geographical Society. 
Even Sir Robert Peel could hold such language in 
private intercourse. With what pride, what hauteur it 
was denounced by the representatives of Old England 
when the radicals first formulated it timidly ! England 
reduced within her narrow isle to the role of a banker 
of the human race, a sort of peaceable Holland, fat, 
silent, without a voice in the management of human 
affairs ! How could such an ignoble idea be conceived ? 
Grave responsibilities, increasing care for the morrow, the 
constant struggle against chance and hydra-headed diffi- 
culties, ambitious ardor that never tires, have they not 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



213 



greatened the character of the race ? Should the cares 
of commerce suffice it ? Has its lofty primacy, which is 
an element of its strength, been merely the offspring of a 
few obscure trading offices ? But this proud language is 
now seldom heard. Political economists and radicals 
find the protection accorded by England to the colonies 
too burdensome, they are ready to sever the umbilical 
cord uniting the colonies with the mother country. They 
would be content to live with them on the footing of free 
trade ; devoted to the peace-policy, they are in search of 
friends rather than allies, and are satisfied if the colonies 
will only cherish some distant sympathy for England. 

The English press is ever busy with these great 
questions ; it is preparing the country with unconscious 
art for all necessary sacrifices ; it feels both the move- 
ments of pride in a patrician race and the promptings 
of patriotic prudence that shuns useless and dangerous 
conflicts. 

In this way alone, by the slow and obscure action of 
public opinion, peace and non-intervention have become 
the poles of the foreign policy of the country. With 
Lord Palmerston was buried that ancient policy which 
had founded, we must admit, the greatness of England, 
and which, blending with infinite art, prudence, and 
boldness, had never shrunk from violence or fraud. This 
policy gave great value to an alliance with England. 
Throwing its weight at an opportune moment on one side 
or the other, England had succeeded in gaining the 
appearance of holding the balance of power. What 



214 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

victories it could not win with its own hands it bought 
with its subsidies ; it humiliated its allies at the same time 
that it overcame its enemies. 

The victory of Waterloo set an unhoped-for crown 
upon this policy ; the plenary and insolent enjoyment of 
its fruits lasted until the Crimean war. But upon that 
distant peninsula, fighting by the side of and under the 
protection, as it were, of its ancient enemy, England saw 
its prestige diminishing. Its army was numbered; people 
admired its valor and pitied its organization. Since that 
time, England has gradually retired from the front of 
military policy ; it has assumed an attitude more on the 
defensive. It still makes its voice heard in the disputes 
of Europe, and sometimes its statesmen indulge in out- 
bursts of pride and eloquence against European govern- 
ments and peoples. But the remonstrances are no longer 
listened to with the same attention \ even those who make 
them know that they cannot dispose of England as they 
would. Diplomatic action, having lost its sanction, is 
afraid of seeming a telum imbelle sine idu. London is no 
longer the pole of European politics. Given up to its 
commerce and industry, rolling in wealth yet grimy with 
the labor of feeding itself, England devotes itself more 
and more to peace. Its little army, admirable in so many 
respects, still costs it a mint of money ; efforts are made 
to reorganize and increase it, but what a figure would it 
make by the side of those peoples in arms that the spirit 
of conquest has raised all over the continent ? 

Nevertheless England must needs make some show 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 2\ ^ 

among the great powers. For centuries it labored to 
establish and maintain the balance of power in Europe ; 
its name stands at the foot of a number of treaties. But 
it would seem that it no longer courts the primacy, or at 
least that it no longer dreads the primacy of other powers. 
In proportion as it has realized that it could no longer 
cope on the continent with great military powers, it has 
adopted a more peaceful policy ; it has adjusted its policy 
to new principles. The mercantile spirit of the bourgeois 
classes, ever encroaching upon the aristocracy, favors the 
change. This spirit has more respect for power wherever 
it is displayed and is little disposed to cope with it. The 
bourgeoisy knows that the astonishing prosperity of the 
country is in a great measure artificial ; it is afraid of com- 
mercial crises, accidents, and risks. During the civil war 
in the United States, England sacrificed to her passion the 
rights of maritime belligerents, those rights for which she 
had once fought so terribly. She exulted in the sight of a 
few corsairs, escaped from her ports, sweeping American 
commerce from the seas. But since then, she has been 
haunted by the recollection of the Alabama ; she has asked 
herself the question, — too late, — what would happen if she 
should have a war on her hands and all at once vessels 
should run out of the ports of some neutral power, justified 
by the precedents she herself has furnished, and proceed 
to hunt her down. The golden statue of English Mammon 
has feet of clay. Suppose for a moment that her com- 
merce were ruined ; it would be no ordinary ruin, it would 
be famine. What would become of her living machines, 



2i6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

her workmen who work for the whole world ? What would 
become of the ancient constitution, the balance of parties ? 
Fictions ! 

The recollection of the Alabama has been the invisible 
but all-powerful curb restraining English policy from pur- 
suing a less humble, less disinterested policy. Of what 
matter to England were the shifting phases of European 
politics, the petty German sovereignties, Prussia, Austria, 
and the Rhine frontier, and even the Eastern question 
itself, in comparison with the risks to be incurred by a 
maritime war ? 

The press is the power that agitates these great cur- 
rents, this flood and ebb of opinion that is slowly dis- 
placing the ideas and even the instincts of Old England. 
The press commits grave mistakes at times ; but they are, 
so to speak, the mistakes of the nation, and once commit- 
ted, the press always endeavors to correct the effects. By 
reason of its impersonal character, it can change more 
easily than statesmen can, who are fettered by their per- 
sonal vanity. It is freer to adapt itself to facts and cir- 
cumstances, to humble and contradict itself It is satisfied 
if it discovers and serves the interests of England j it can 
not abase itself, so to speak, as long as it pursues these. 
Its feelers are always out to discover the danger of the 
hour. It overcomes ancient prejudices, exposes the hol- 
lowness of what Bacon called stage-idols. It slowly 
detaches England from the continent, given over perhaps 
to a deplorable decline, attaches it more firmly to its own 
island, turns its eyes to the new worlds where the shoots 



FORMA TION OF POLITIC A L HABITS. 2 1 



of Anglo-Saxon civilization are budding apace. English 
liberty seems to Europe like a sun hung over the horizon 
of the sea. The 4-tlantic is broad and the Channel very 
narrow, but jt is farther from London to Paris than from 
London to Washington. 

The English press had a greater share in the final set- 
tlement of the Alabama claims than the statesmen had. 
The press made it its study to pacify the anger of the 
United States ; it submitted to, then acquiesced in, finally 
celebrated the victory of the Union. The most crafty 
diplomatist could not have succeeded better in concealing 
his extreme desire to negotiate, or in defending inch by 
inch a position that he had decided upon abandoning. 
The press incessantly took up the thread dropped by the 
ministers. At last the treaty of Washington and the arbi- 
tration of Geneva came to put an end to the protracted 
controversy. England, while seeming to yield, has suc- 
ceeded in purchasing cheaply its commercial security ; 
.seeming to submit to the rules of international law that are 
to become hereafter its safeguard, it has regained freedom 
of action. It is still the rival but it is no longer the enemy 
of the United States. 

The press, anonymous and irresponsible, is not dodri- 
7iaire ; it has none but shifting hatreds and friendships. 
It beholds great revolutions going on over the continent 
without any other emotion than it would have at a play. 
It likes to regard Europe as a vast field of experiments, 
and points out to England fasting the spectacle of intoxi- 
cated kings and peoples. In its disdain for continental 



2i8 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

nations, dashed with vague apprehension, there is some- 
thing akin to the feelings with which the lofty papacy, 
enthroned upon the centuries, looks down upon the pass- 
ing governments, their noisy triumphs and their catastro- 
phes. It applauds in turn revolution and the reactions 
that ensue ; it would never like to see the continent either 
too agitated or too quiet. It lectures all the powers : 
every catastrophe that it has foreseen seems to it to be 
necessary. It appears satisfied with finding the reason for 
every event, and even becomes reconciled to what has 
taken it by surprise and belied its wisdom. It is attached, 
more from pride than from interest, to the preservation of 
certain dynasties and states ; but we can detect, even in 
its protection, a certain amount of indifference and incre- 
dulity. The old balance of power in Europe overthrown, 
England was not long in siding with new Italy, with new 
Germany; she is consoled at the sight of the growing 
greatness of certain powers, provided other powers, that 
she had long dreaded, seem to her less dangerous. She 
leaves the dead to follow the living. She disarms fortune 
, by applauding the victor. She is always thinking of her- 
self. And who would blame her therefor 1 The press, 
suspicious, inquisitive, keeeps up a perpetual search after 
the enemies of the country ; it sometimes braves the strong, 
in order that its praise may have more merit. It bestows 
its protection on the weak, that the name of England may 
be blessed. It sets itself up as the moral director of 
Europe, so to appear purer, nobler to the people of Eng- 
land. Above all else, it labors to preserve intact the faith 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS, 



219 



that England has in herself, her own superiority, her own 
foresight, her venerable institutions and doctrines. 

What fruit has not a hidden worm ? The observer who 
seeks to study the secret motors of public opinion can not 
help noticing that English clearsightedness, rarely at fault 
in matters of domestic policy, is, on the other hand, more 
frequently and more grossly deceived than in times past 
upon matters of foreign policy. In vain do active, stirring, 
intelligent agents and correspondents send home to Eng- 
land a sort of living photograph of the world at large. It 
would seem as if, the moment England looked beyond her- 
self, her vision became troubled. Invincible egoism, 
excessive disdain hiding from her the moral forces at work 
among men, secret dishke for all greatness that has not 
borrowed from her, everything seems to mislead her. 
Her empiricism, her mania for observing everything in 
detail, conceal from her what is clear to others less able. 
There was a sort of madness, for instance, in her judg- 
ments upon the war of secession in America and her 
prognostications about the fate of the American Union. 
Nobody knew the events better and nobody understood 
them worse. If a question arises as to France or Russia, 
English opinion becomes at times flurried, so to speak, and 
infatuated. The representatives of parliamentary and 
constitutional government set themselves up as advisers 
of coups d' etat ; they worship abroad what they would 
burn at home ; they choose for themselves idols of a day, 
that they are the first to break. They get up a sort of 
sham fanaticism, seek to do violence to facts, and deduce 



220 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

from them things that they do not contahi. Their imagi- 
nation is always trying to knead over history. They get 
angry at kings, parliaments, peoples, for not following their 
flattering or threatening prophecies. 



III. 



Among the forces that pluck man out of his native 
egoism and show him something beyond himself, no one 
is more persistent, without doubt, than the religious senti- 
ment. The churches are in England the school of the 
citizen. This comes from their being in a state of con- 
flict ; the spirit of sect bears some resemblance to the 
spirit of party in demanding, like the latter, an active zeal, 
a faith that displays itself in works, an organization of 
human energy. The Catholic ideal has this admirable 
trait, that it obliterates all distinctions of race, age, class, 
rank, government ; Catholic unity destroys whatever sepa- 
rates and consequently also whatever groups men ; it 
prostrates them before God as dust, the grains of which do 
need to know one another. It crushes them with the 
splendor of its edifices, where they seem lost like insects, 
it drives their soul from mere earthly paths. Assuredly 
there is something sublime in a faith that disdains visible 
triumphs, power, wealth, success. Protestant faith bends 
the springs of the will to the world ; it always seems to be 
under the necessity, so to speak, of proving to itself its 
excellence ; is less contemplative and more stirring, less 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS, 221 

poetic and more reasoning, less mystic and more robust. 
It gathers men into bundles, groups, petty jealous 
societies that watch and observe one another and learn 
how to govern themselves. 

All these societies have their rules, their laws, their 
discipline, their confessions of faith ; no one can be 
received into them without becoming a combatant. The 
Great National Church always gets whatever is grandest, 
most venerable and illustrious, but it lives under the watch- 
ful eye of the Dissenting churches, that are half laic and 
that compel it to emerge continually from its ancient 
quietude and mingle in mundane matters. It preserves 
its empire over the hearts of men only upon condition of 
not remaining insensible to whatever is agitating them. 
It discusses political problems from afar, as it were, and 
with hauteur ; but it does not ignore nor despise them ; 
it makes its power a support of the ancient order of things, 
of necessary innovations, of progress that is not to be gain- 
said ; it does not assume toward politics the attitude of a 
disdainful looker-on, it sends its bishops to the House of 
Lords, it is present at every ceremony, every civic meet- 
ing. It mixes with the people ; it may be seen in the 
school-room, in the town-hall, on the magistrate's bench ; 
it sheds some of its rays upon the humble, vulgar, material 
things of daily life. The official religion becomes one of 
the forms of the State ; it fills the universities, it encircles 
and deifies, so to speak, royalty. There are few public 
dinners where the health of the Church is not drunk after 
the toasts to the Queen and the royal family. 



222 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Canterbury and York have archbishops. There are 
not less than twenty-six bishops. Every diocese has its 
archdeacons, its deans, its canons, its prebendaries. 
There are deans of the chapter,- rural deans, provincial 
deans, deans of the university colleges, honorary deans, 
and others. By the side of this vast and wealthy hierarchy, 
the Dissenting churches have theirs too ; they have their 
churches, their estates, their synods, their annual confer- 
ences. The Wesleyan Methodists have more than seven 
thousand chapels. The primitive Methodists have more 
than three thousand. The Independents and Baptists, 
together, more than eight thousand. A number of sects 
live more isolated, humble but free : the Friends, the Uni- 
tarians, the Moravians, the new Wesleyans, the Bible 
Christians, the Latter Day Saints, the English Presbyte- 
rians, the United Presbyterians. The Catholics, now en- 
franchised, have their convents, their schools, their churches. 
All these churches, being free, are expected to govern 
themselves ; they call upon their members for pecuniary 
sacrifices and disinterested efforts and subject them to 
voluntary discipline. The more humble the church, the 
more time, the more zeal, the more devotedness it demands. 
In the great commercial and manufacturing cities, a bour- 
geoisie parvenue that has grown up in the shadow of long 
despised sects takes pride in being generous. It pays the 
highest price for the eloquence of its preachers ; it would 
fill its temples with riches, did not its very faith object. 

The Dissenters have a prominent position in parliament. 
They bring with them into politics that tenacity, that spirit 



FORMATION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



223 



of propaganda, that sort of stirring dullness and patient 
inquietude, that are characteristic of sects. They know how 
to stir up the people to its depths, how to reach its most muf- 
fled and hidden instincts ; they are at once the vanguard and 
the rear-guard of the liberal party ; they always get and al- 
ways give the last blows. Social questions, in a country where 
the constitution has no professed enemies, occupy a pre- 
dominant position ; religious passions, Christianity, phi- 
lanthropy, are, so to speak, the subsoil of parliament. The 
High Church, the Low Church, the Free Churches strug- 
gle for the leadership ; they aim at being the inspiration 
of legislation ; they can not, like vulgar politicians, flatter 
the ignoble passions of the multitude ; they are obliged 
both to speak to it in the stern accents of morality and to 
watch over its needs. They thus give a Christian coloring 
to the laws upon public charities, public education, the 
regulation of labor, upon health, hygiene, and even to fis- 
cal laws themselves. They think less of making citizens 
than of making Christians and men. But the civic virtues 
are the growth of religious germs. Liberty is not only 
considered a weapon against foes, but it becomes a faith, 
it imposes duties, it makes life not a perpetual combat but 
a perpetual labor. 

Close contact and free competition among religions 
are favorable to civic virtue. Who, even among the most 
fiery Catholics, has not the confused feeling that the 
French Revolution would not have had such terrible and 
painful miscarriages, if there had remained, in the face of 
effete royalty and an aristocracy of courtiers, an old 



224 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Huguenot party, a more austere nobility, provincial, 
proud, and jealous ? Saint Bartholomew and the Reign 
of Terror are accomplices in date. Protestantism has 
long since ceased to do more than vegetate upon French 
soil, and the Protestant spirit, that spirit which is neither 
revolt nor submission, is still wanting in our politics. 
Man carries with him into public affairs something of his 
own religious spirit. Italian politics, even when strug- 
gling against Rome, display the patience 2iX\di finesse of the 
Vatican. Revolutions in France are like sins for which 
the nation consents to do long penance ; she punishes 
herself for her license by abdicating ; she goes from the 
tribune to the despot, from the despot to the tribune. 

After religions have ceased to persecute one another, 
they still continue to watch one another and serve as a 
mutual check. The Anglican church has always some 
rival ; the little Wesleyan, Presbyterian, or Baptist chapel 
is never far from the Anglican chapel. Thus England 
has the advantages both of a state religion and of freedom 
of worship. The two churches, the Established and the 
Dissenting, are, from the religious point of view, the 
counterpart of the Lords and the Commons. The one 
represents the past, with its abiding reminiscences ; the 
other, the passions and troubles of the present. In 
Catholic countries, like France, the clergy has no share 
in civil government or administration, nor has the laity 
any more in the government of the church. It is quite 
the reverse in England. The two societies the civil and 
the religious, are not distinct, so to speak ; the priest is 



FORMATION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



225 



not so rigorously confined to his church by the jealousy 
of the laity or by care for his prestige. In the country, it 
is unusual for him not to take a very active part in the 
administration of justice, in municipal life, in all works 
that call for the joint action of citizens. In the cities, he 
is an active agent of philanthropy ; he busies himself with 
schools, hygiene, and hospitals, he is seen in company 
with doctors, engineers, chemists. The old novelists 
have depicted the country parson as a great eater and 
drinker, a bold huntsman always just behind the hounds. 
This clerical Nimrod still exists and has not fallen off in 
popularity ; but we could exhibit other types at the 
present day : the priest absorbed in science, statistics, 
political economy, as careful for the bodies as the souls 
of men, the leader in every kind of progress, animated 
with the spirit of social reform. The personnel of the 
great universities and public schools is almost entirely 
clerical. 

If the clergy mingles thus incessantly in civil life, the 
laity, on the other hand, does not remain a stranger to 
the government of the church. The Anglican Church, it 
is true, does not admit them to its assemblies. The 
Upper Chamber of the province of Canterbury is com- 
posed of twenty-two bishops ; the Lower Chamber, of all 
the deans and archdeacons, a deputy from each chapter 
and two proxies for the clergy of each diocese. But this 
Synod, which is called the Convocation, can no longer 
enact canons without the consent of the king and 
parliament. Parliament, which is a lay body, has reserved 
10* 



226 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



this right to itself since the days of Charles I. ; it has 
regulated the liturgy and taken away from the Convo- 
cation the authority of a council. As to the Dissenting 
Churches, they all have a mixed form of government, 
in which both pastors and congregations are represented. 
Thus the spirit of discussion has a thousand different 
fields for its activity, as well in the official church as 
among the sects. 



IV. 



Underneath and by the side of the religious societies 
are all sorts of civil societies. The former keep the soul 
aloof from the world, the latter confirm it in the world 
and thrust it back, so to speak, upon the world. In a 
society where methodical legislation has regulated every- 
thing, where one supreme will makes itself felt through a 
thousand channels to the most remote extremities of the 
empire, the individual, propped up, protected, directed, 
at last falls asleep in a sort of selfish quietude. The 
more the laws are perfected, the more the men become 
mediocre. When there is a regulation for everything, 
there is no more room for self-imposed rule. Nothing is 
more tedious than to study or describe the local and 
municipal institutions of England, because we cannot 
detect in them any apparent order, any general rule, any 
simple principle. Yet there are two things controlling 
all the others and lighting up with a fixed light this con- 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



227 



fused mass of customs, institutions and abuses. The 
one is what I shall call the idea of corporation, or 
association, the other is the unswerving notion of contract, 
feiidum. Kindred interests have, from time immemorial, 
drawn together and organized themselves into groups ; by 
uniting for various purposes, men have formed various 
sorts of multiple persons, legal, lasting, immortal beings. 
But these persons, that are after a fashion impersonal, 
have never aspired to absolute sovereignty ; they have 
made bargains and treaties with the State, whether king 
or parliament ; they have always paid homage to the 
sovereign and acknowledged his authority. Their liberty 
moves within a limited sphere, defined by charters, con- 
tracts, written grants or customs. 

The idea of individual sovereignty, of the rights of 
man, is not the bond of union of all these groups and 
corporations, but rather the idea of a bargain, a duty, 
contracted obligations, the need of working for some 
common end. The liberty of corporations, communes, 
parishes, boards and committees of all kinds, is all the 
more energetic, jealous, and active for being subject to 
the general laws of the realm. It does not inspire the 
law, neither can it make nor interpret the law, but it 
makes use of it as an aegis and a protection. 

In France, the Commune has always been either servile 
or rebellious. The ancient Gallic municipalities were 
copies of imperial Rome ; Perigueux, Bourges, Marseilles, 
Reims, Paris, Metz, Aries, Toulouse, Narbonne, Nimes 
were consular cities. " Civitassit libera et iiullius juris die 



228 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

tioni siihjecta.'''' Paris has neither solicited nor obtained a 
royal charter ; it is the same with most French cities. 
They regard themselves as having sovereign rights. It 
was the dream of Etienne Marcel to found a confederation 
of sovereign cities, of which Paris should be the chief. 
Speaking of his revolt, a French historian has said : " We 
feel the revolutionary verve and at the same time the 
administrative genius of the great commune " (Michelet). 
The great commune, namely, is the Reign of Terror, taking 
the place of the king, oppressing even the national 
assembly, in possession of every power, recruiting its own 
army, exclusively legislating for the city. Either the com- 
mune oppresses the State or is oppressed by it. " The 
most ancient and most important communes, says Thierry, 
grew up spontaneously, by insurrection, against seignorial 
power." It is only in the north, in Flanders, Normandy, 
and the Maine, in the eastern districts bordering on the 
German Empire, that we find communes that are neither 
rebellious nor sovereign by virtue of the old Roman law. 
They are corporations bound by a treaty in due form, by 
a royal charter. Leveling royalty passed over all these 
communes of such varied origin, crushing out in one place 
the germs of Latin hberty, in another the germs of Teutonic 
liberty. The Revolution continued the work begun by 
royalty : the temper of our ancestors in this matter may be 
summed up in the following opinion, uttered by a mem- 
ber of the Council of Five Hundred : " France is a repub- 
lic one and indivisible. Can we permit this republic, 
formed by the will and the combined interests of the nation, 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



229 



to be broken up into a multitude of corporations that 
thrust themselves in between the State and its members 
in such a manner as to subdivide the one great association 
into as many petty governments as there are villages and 
hamlets and encourage that municipal spirit which the con- 
stitution has sought to destroy ? We have done all that we 
could to destroy these bastard authorities." — The Revolu- 
tion always had for its ideal the subjection of France 
to the dictatorship of Paris. The Commune of Paris has 
never been a simple municipality, it has been a usurping 
and insurgent Committee armed with every political right. 
When the Revolution offered to all the communes abso- 
lute independence, the right of arming and defending 
themselves and governing themselves without control, it 
did so only in the hour of struggle, when it had need of 
provincial allies against a government that still held out. 
After its triumph, it never kept its promises, it always 
withheld from the communes not merely the rights of 
sovereignty but administrative independence. 

The history of the English commune has been differ- 
ent, it has never aspired to political independence. All 
the free boroughs in England were at the start corpora- 
tions ; they had for title only a royal charter. These 
charters converted the inhabitants of the towns into free- 
men, gave them freedom of trade and commerce, the right 
of holding markets, fiscal franchises, electoral privileges, 
but never gave them the least particle of that executive 
authority which belongs only to the sovereign. English 
municipal liberty is the result of contract; it has a 



230 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



Germanic character; the emperors always treated with 
communal corporations as with vassals. But the indepen- 
dence which begins with vassalage is more likely to last 
than that which begins wath rebellion. It threatens no 
right, it is humble and patient. Is it not a singular coin- 
cidence that the two most disgraceful treaties that France 
has ever signed, five centuries apart, the treaty of Bretigny 
and the treaty of Frankfort, should be the chastisement 
of the two most formidable explosions of Latin municipal 
spirit, the commune of Etienne Marcel and the commune 
ofiSyi.? No English city, not even London, has ever 
aspired to give laws to the kingdom, and never have the 
English cities been punished for their usurpations by the 
complete loss of municipal franchises. Political liberty has 
never sought to have any other agent than parliament ; 
neither royalty nor the cities have had any interest in 
destroying charters. Sovereignty is in the law, in a union 
of ideal forces ; not in city parks and walls. People know 
what is meant by a free city, but they do not know what is 
meant by a State made up of free cities. Collecting men 
together in masses does not confer upon them any new 
political rights ; it only imposes upon them cares and 
duties, and consequently attributes of a purely domestic 
nature. The municipality should be one degree lower 
than the State. So it is in England ; we do not find the 
legislator in the parish or the town-council. Thousands 
of petty rural or municipal communities have their self-gov- 
ernment, their money matters, their petty government by 
representation, all differing somewhat ; landed property, 



FORMATION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 23 1 

the church, the people are represented. According to the 
ancient Saxon custom, each parishioner who paid his taxes 
was entitled to a seat in the council, the vestry ; in the 
course of time the councils became close corporations, 
oligarchies. In almost every case the voting became 
cumulative, i. e., each vote counted in proportion to the 
taxes paid by the voter, one counting as one, another as 
ten, etc. Since 1831 (Hobhouse Act), the parishes have 
had a more equitable way of voting. 

It is easy enough to arraign this system of municipal 
corporations founded under the protection of royal charters, 
to point out the abuses committed by these petty govern- 
ments that made their own profit out of the property of 
the corporation, its loans, tolls, and electoral rights, now 
become a monopoly, and generally kept their proceedings 
secret. These petty oligarchies, limited in their sphere 
and jealous of their rights, neglected too often their real 
functions, concerned themselves less about police, prisons, 
lighting and paving streets, public health, than about 
defending their patronage and the public dinners where 
they displayed their luxury. One city was in the hands of 
a close corporation that elected its own members ; another 
was delivered up to a council and its creatures, taken from 
the most wretched classes and invested, under the title of 
freejnen, with the electoral privilege. These abuses lasted 
until the Reform of 1832 ; at the present day, municipal 
government is truly representative and no longer oligar- 
chic. Parliament overthrew, as soon as it saw fit, these 
petty old councils, and passed a municipal act giving to 



232 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



all tax-payers a right of control over the administration 
and over the employment of public money. The monop- 
oly of municipal corporations had necessarily to come to 
an end with the parliamentary monopoly of the aristocracy. 
Still, these corporations had not been without their utility ; 
they were so occupied with their own privileges, that they 
never thought of making any incursions into the field of 
general politics to defy or rule the State. They were like 
misers who, to conceal their wealth, make themselves 
appear humble and poverty-stricken. The State could 
ignore and despise them ; but this ignoring and contempt 
became the guaranties of independence. These corpora- 
tions have been an obstacle in the way of progress. They 
have operated almost everywhere as a restraint upon Dis- 
senters and have fettered trade to its injury. Birmingham 
owes its prosperity to the circumstance that it was at first 
a refuge for Dissenters, a free city for trade and industry. 
The parliamentary investigation of 183 1 let in the daylight 
upon the obscurity of these corporations. They had, it is 
true, contributed to the formation of public habits in Eng- 
land; but the life had long since gone out of them, and 
nothing remained but the mildew of abuses. They had 
lost much of their usefulness, now that freedom of meeting 
and freedom of association had become inviolable. In 
place of the old, worm-eaten machines, new ones were 
created day by day, moveable and transitor}^, suited to 
shifting needs. The provincial character of the corpora- 
tions gave way to the modern spirit, that demands rapid 
and incessant progress. 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



233 



The law did not touch the ancient corporation of Lon- 
don, protected by so many memories. Its vulgar luxury, 
the confusion of its finances, its detestable administration, 
have not yet filled up the measure of English patience. 
But all sorts of special committees (Boards) are placed 
over it, leaving it little more than the outward show. Still, 
people have a vague sort of fear of thoroughly consolidat- 
ing London into a municipality, and thus placing by the 
side of parliament a government representing three millions 
of men. What would the Commune of London be ? At the 
present day, the City is only a sort of bourgeois principal- 
ity, the richest in the world, that delights in bestowing its 
lavish hospitality upon kings and emperors and their 
ambassadors. 

In studying English municipal institutions, we are struck 
with the utter absence of symmetry, system or method. 
The municipium has not destroyed the parish. By the side 
of mayors and town councils, we find wardens and vestry- 
men, some occupied in collecting the poor-rates and super- 
intending charitable institutions, others occupied with the 
revenues of the church ; beadles and policemen together 
see that the Sunday laws are observed. In name at least, 
the church still continues to be the providence of the poor. 
It submits only with impatience to the supervision of com- 
missioners. The action of the State is principally manifest 
in the creation of special committees (Boards), charged 
with various offices. The cities call upon parliament for 
local laws authorizing them to make improvements, such 
as docks, ports, water-works ; these local laws create new 



234 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



kinds of corporations,— elective and responsible,— temporary 
organs of administration. New instruments are constantly 
being made for fresh wants. All these groups, corporations, 
committees, derive their power from the act of the sovereign ; 
their freedom is restrained in its action only by public 
opinion and by the courts. They are not infected either 
with bureaucratic servility or with the spirit of revolution. 
Most of the functions relating to municipal administration, 
schools, churches, public aid, public health, are rendered 
gratuitously. They impose duties ; they raise the citizen to 
a higher plane, accustom him to voluntary rules and respon- 
sibilities, to daily sacrifices, to contact with opposing and 
independent wishes ; they drag the rich, the noble, the 
idle, out of themselves, and place before their eyes the 
world with its needs, its desires, its sufferings, its disgrace, 
its moral ailments. 

It is the same with those countless societies that are 
not connected in any way with government or administra- 
tion.* No one is suffered to keep to himself ; a thousand 
hands are always ready to drag the rich man from his 
repose ; his hand must be always open, he must give to 
art and science, to poverty, to fashion, to his party, to his 
church. Society seems to be ever saying to man : " What 

* There are hundreds of societies, for instance, that take the place 
of public judicial action ; for want of magistrates charged with follow- 
ing up crime and misdemeanor, there are societies for preventing 
the corruption of the morals of youth, stopping the publication of 
obscene books and prints, denouncing medical malpractice, hunting 
out forgeries and counterfeiting, etc. etc. All these associations aim 
at preserving public order, they come to the aid of private interests. 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 235 

would you be by yourself ? All that you are worth, all 
that you possess, you owe to me. I have need of your 
hands, your words, your exertions. Your fortune is one 
of the golden nails in my temple ; your glory, a ray from 
mine ; your life, only an hour of national life." There is 
no idleness ; no task is declined. Is it in order to escape 
from the nebulous ennui that is always threatening to cover 
up life in dull countries where nature affords so little to the 
senses ? Is there need of some whirl of excitement to 
keep up energy, that indispensable weapon in over-popu- 
lated countries ? Is it the rude instinct that keeps together 
animals of the same herd ? Is it the active sense of duty 
never satisfied, ever seeking fresh burdens ? Is it an 
instinctive protest against the venerable hierarchy of the 
aristocracy, a search after whatever may furnish new bonds 
of union among men, may draw them closer together and 
unite them in a common work .'' 

Be it as it may, if we explore the cultivated classes, we 
shall find very few lives perfectly solitary and purely self- 
ish. The more embellished and respectable and brilliant 
such lives might be through the refinements afforded by 
civilization, the more dastardly they would appear. This 
incessant exertion, that takes men out of the narrow circle 
of their interests, is like a ransom, something to be paid 
as a matter of course. Each man must give what he has. 
Some give their name, others money, others their time 
and their words. No one is permitted to be avaricious. 
We might fill whole pages with a list of societies and asso- 
ciations, some of which exercise functions elsewhere 



236 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

assigned to the State. The great leagues that are formed 
from time to time are spontaneous political forces, stirring 
up public opinion, enlisting the timid and indifferent, and 
organizing the national will. They rise like human tides. 
Who has not heard of the history of the league for the 
abolition of the corn laws 1 

The Latin mind, that likes order, discipline, the State, 
is shocked by the rudeness, the tumult of those great pop- 
ular movements in England that prepare the way for and 
hasten reform. There is something ridiculous in every 
assemblage of men, something that grates upon a sensitive 
taste, some bungling, grotesque, broken-down actors, some 
hypocrites, some consequential ones, some bores. But no 
method has yet been invented of governing men ab extra, 
with a fairy's wand ; they must come in contact with one 
another, must see, measure, judge one another. There is 
too much of contempt in the wisdom of the moralist who 
turns his back upon crowds and holds up his cloak that it 
may not catch the mud. The best and the purest lose 
something by solitude : the capacity of feeling strongly 
for others, self-oblivion, generosity, courage. 

The English law has retained Jldei co7nmissa (trusts), 
and the universal use of them may be regarded as having 
some remote influence upon public habits. It lays upon 
a multitude of persons the obligations arising from respon- 
sibility ; it forces them continually to occupy themselves 
with interests other than their own. There is scarcely a 
person that is not a sort of tutor^ a trustee, for some 
woman, or relative, or friend ; for some corporation or 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



237 



society ; people look upon it quite as a matter of course 
to perform their duties as trustees gratuitously. One of 
the Catholic archbishops of Ireland, I have been informed, 
has in his keeping eight millions of francs per annum \ 
this sum is entrusted to him by his co-religionists in virtue 
of his dignity. Such a system presupposes confidence 
between man and man, it ennobles the race ; it has its 
inconveniences, doubtless, but it enhances the feeling of 
solidarity among men. 

No country, perhaps, has been so long and so thor- 
oughly centralized as England, in this sense, that there is 
but one sovereignty, that of the king and his parliament, 
and this sovereignty is in its way unlimited. At the same 
time there is no country where we perceive so few traces 
of central authority. Royal power and parliamentary 
power overthrew at an early date all their rivals ; they 
established political unity, but they did not concern them- 
selves about administrative unity. In other centralized 
countries, the government, not content with making the 
laws, is bent upon having everywhere, even in the villages, 
defenders and interpreters of those laws. In England, we 
shall look in vain for these advocates of the government, 
prefects, sub-prefects, mayors, in direct correspondence 
with the agents of the central power \ this active and obe- 
dient army of functionaries, regents of opinion and trans- 
lators of will, who flit from one end of the country to the 
other. Royalty never succeeded in overthrowing the aris- 
tocratic class, and this class, retaining the political power 
at Westminster, has also held on to the administrative 



238 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

power in the provinces. Its representatives are the Lords- 
Lieutenant, whose office is only a costly sinecure,* the 
Sheriffs, who give the judges on their circuit a pompous 
reception and are supposed to protect them, and the Jus- 
tices of the Peace, whose services, like those of the sher- 
iff, are gratuitous. Nowhere do we find long-robed gentry 
{gefis de robe) ; for most cases are brought before magis- 
trates who are landed gentry of the county, or before the 
itinerant judges (from Wesminster) who make their cir- 
cuits twice a year. This system has been in vogue ever 
since Henry 11. (1179), who was the first to divide Eng- 
land into circuits. There was no chance, then, for the 
formation of a noblesse de robe., or parleme?its like those we 
see in France prior to 1789 ; the influence derived from 
the administration of justice is disseminated and dissolved, 
as it were, throughout the nation. It is all the more pro- 
found from this circumstance, that all cases tried at West- 
minster or before the circuit judges are submitted to a 
jury, whether the matter be one of civil or of criminal 
law. The jury has only to pass upon matters of fact, but 
the judge always instructs them as to the consequences 
of their verdict, defines every question with precision, 
throws as much light as possible upon the case ; the 
jurors, moreover, being called upon to fix the amount 
of damages, are compelled to weigh for themselves the 

* James II. tried to convert the Lords-Lieutenant into electoral 
agents, prefects. He ordered them to lay certain interrogatories before 
their deputies and the Justices of the Peace, and draw up lists of the 
friends of the king. Half of them refused to play this new part, the 
others gave the king trivial answers. 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



239 



most delicate shades in the nexus of cause and effect. 
The venerable institution of the jury has, beyond a doubt, 
aided powerfully in developing public conscience and 
rendering the English people familiar with legislative 
problems. 

The nation has reserved for itself, so to speak, the 
right of judging; it has contented itself with a very small 
number of guides, judicial oracles. The Chancellor and his 
Vice-Chancellors, the Westminster judges, are not numer- 
ous enough to constitute a caste ; the lawyers are few in 
number, overwhelmed with work, consuming their zeal and 
their strength in the incessant study of the most complica- 
ted legal system in the world. Wherever codes exist, the 
study of the law becomes an easy thing; the entire legisla- 
tion of the State of Illinois is contained in two volumes, 
and every ten years the legislature makes a new edition. 
The result is that any intelligent man there may become a_ 
lawyer in a few months ; but the student of so easy a sys- 
tem is speedily tempted to become law-maker. The legis 
latures in America, like the French Chambers since 1789, 
are overrun with legists ; the lawyer-spirit has never invad- 
ed the English Commons. There are lawyers among them, 
to be sure ; but the influence, the initiative, is still with 
the purely political spirit. Moreover, the land-owners who 
fill the House are all or nearly all justices or magistrates, 
something more than mere talkers. They have had, they 
still have in their keeping the honor, the lives, the liberties, 
the fortunes of citizens. From the very circumstance that 
the bulk of the nation is used to the sight and administration 



240 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

of justice, its representatives are less under the sway of 
professors of chicanery and dealers in words. 

City government is a sort of republic, the municipal 
charter taking the place of a constitution. The municipal 
magistrates are not lords, or gentry ; they are ordinarily 
bourgeois, merchants ; they are called elders {aldermen). 
These petty local governments are most unpretending ; 
they have no political influence or ambition. They do not 
aspire to representing the State ; they do not get their 
orders from anybody and do not pretend to give orders to 
anybody. The government of the boroughs is almost the 
same as that of the cities. In the villages, there is neither 
mayor nor council of any kind. It must be understood 
that these villages are nothing but dependencies of the great 
estates, outhouses for blacksmiths, vyheelwrights, carpen- 
ters, inn-keepers, field-laborers, the schoolmaster, a few 
petty shopkeepers. The village is not the unit of admin- 
istration, it is merely an agglomeration. Formerly, the 
lord of the village had the right of holding a baronial 
court ; he appointed a constable to preserve order and to 
pursue and imprison malefactors until they could be 
brought before the judge. The squire on his estate was 
like a king, he was the judge in everything that concerned 
the land and the people on it. 

At the present day, the government of the counties be- 
longs as a matter of fact to the county magistrates, the Jus- 
tices of the Peace, who exercise both judicial and adminis- 
trative functions. These notables, appointed by the Lord- 
Chancellor on the recommendation of the Lord-Lieutenant, 



FORMA TION OF P OLI TIC A L HA BITS. 24 1 

sit four times a year. These are the permanent general 
councils ; they fix the county-rates, and adjust the propor- 
tions for the several items of expenditure ; attend to the 
poor-rates, the county-police, roads, jails, taverns, inn- 
keepers, licenses, weights and measures, asylums for the 
insane.''^ They act also as examining magistrates in crimi- 
nal proceedings, and, with the cooperation of a jury, take 
cognizance of crimes punishable by transportation for a 
term of years, by imprisonment, or fine. They act as a 
court of appeal for sentences passed by the Justices of the 
Peace in case of misdemeanor. 

The stranger who wishes to get at a glance a clear and 
vivid idea of England, should not go to parliament, per- 
haps, nor to the House of Lords, but to some provincial 
town where the Court of Quarter Sessions is sitting. There 
are one thousand eight hundred of these judges in Eng- 
land, volunteer magistrates, general councillors, invested 
with the most extensive administrative, executive, and 
judicial powers. These sovereigns on a small scale are 
men of the world, belonging to the class from which we in 
France have taken, thus far, our conseillers ghieraux. It 
should be observed that they are independent of the 
electors ; the municipal governments are elected and 
are responsible, but the county governments are not 
elected and are not held to direct responsibility. They 

* When the county wishes to make extraordinary expenditures for 
improvements or otherwise, they draw up a bill to be presented to 
parliament, authorizing the county to create a loan or impose a spe- 
cial tax. 

II 



242 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

exercise a sort of traditionary patronage ; they represent 
the idea, — now dying out, — of patriarchal, paternal gov- 
ernment. Young men of twenty-one have their names 
entered upon the list of justices of the peace ; they are 
sportsmen sitting in judgment on poachers, owners punish- 
ing infringements on the rights of property. 

It is very easy to criticise such a system ; still, we can 
understand how, being kept up for centuries, it must have 
developed a race essentially political, proud, accustomed 
to command, drinking in with the air of its fields the feel- 
ing of its own power and independence. The county 
courts date back to the Conquest ; the ^oxvi\2iVi free tenants 
attended them, sword in hand and the baldric slung over 
their shoulders, and judged all suits, excepting those of the 
high barons, which were reserved for the aula regia. The 
barbarian confusion of powers is still to be seen in these 
petty assemblages of notables. The masters of the soil 
perceive nothing above or even beside them. What is 
there to remind them that all power must bow before 
inflexible justice ? they are judges; before the majesty of 
the State ? they themselves exercise almost all the func- 
tions assigned in other lands to the State ; even before 
divine majesty itself? the ministers of God are their clients. 
The magistracy does not exist as a great body, separate 
from the others and stern, that threatens as much as it 
protects. Administration is a plain over which the indi- 
vidual marches, not a mountain looking down upon him. 
The provincial forces are like springs wide apart ; there 
is no river into which they can empty and lose themselves 



FORMA TION OF POLITICAL HABITS. 



243 



one in the other. The contributions of the towns and 
counties do not first pass through the hands of State col- 
lectors ; in France, even when the department or the 
commune imposes its own taxes, it still seems to be the 
almoner of the State. 

Election and selection, the republican system of the 
town and the aristocratic system of the country, although 
so widely different, still labor under the same radical 
inconveniences ; they suffer the administration to fall into 
incapable hands. A certain sturdy good sense, a very nice 
sense of honor among gentlemen, personal rectitude, zeal 
for the public good will not take the place of the mass of tech- 
nical knowledge that is now indispensable in public admin- 
istration. There is the science of highways, the science of 
hospitals, the science of primary education, the science of 
public aids and charities, the science of public health, and 
others, that can not produce their full results unless favored 
by a certain centralization of skill, effort, and will. 

It was the terrible problem of public charity that 
first forced England to depart from traditionary routine. 
The parishes sufficed for the charities of past times ; our 
modern times call for parochial union. All the sciences 
that I have mentioned have their organs in special com- 
mittees. Parliament creates them one by one, enlarges, 
perfects them. Every year it takes another step toward 
centralization ; but it must be carefully understood that 
this centralization does not create any new political forces ; 
it springs solely from the need of reducing expenses and 
bettering the condition of the people. 



244 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



The reform of the Poor Laws was the point of depart- 
ure of the move toward unity, order, and control in admin- 
istration ; the new spirit, quite humble and undecided at 
the outset, in fact almost unconscious of itself, still con- 
tents itself with small gains. The Rating and Local 
Government Act of 187 1, undertook to strip the municipal 
corporations of many of their ancient rights. By the terms of 
the Municipal Corporation Act of 1836, these corporations 
elected annually auditors of accounts, to be taken from 
among the tax-payers. They had the right of levying direct 
taxes, had their collectors, their ^sc2i\ personnel. The new 
law tends to place the government of the towns, in a finan- 
cial point of view, under the direction of the centralized 
administration of public aids. To effect this object, it 
makes use of the parishes, setting them up against the 
municipal corporations. Every parish that has an over- 
seer of the poor has a parish committee, elected, that is 
charged with levying the consolidated rate, so called because 
it comprises all the local taxes. These parish committees 
or boards submit their accounts to salaried auditors, who 
are State agents^ and who can cut dov^^n excessive expendi- 
tures, strike out such as are not authorized by law, and 
insist upon such as are prescribed by law. The boards 
appoint tax collectors, who are subordinated to a central 
board called the board for local government, that prescribes 
the forms of accounts and the manner of verifying them, 
and fixes the salaries of the auditors. The parish boards 
have the right of fixing the quotas of the consolidated tax. 

If this law is enforced strictly, it is evident that the 



FORMA TION- OF POLITICAL HABITS. 245 

power of the municipal corporations will diminish more 
and more. The financial administration of the towns will 
be under the control of boards directed by the central 
authority. Parliament will soon have to overhaul all local 
institutions. At present there are too many and too dis- 
proportionate centres of administration : ist, the parish ; 
2d, the borough or city ; 3d, the county ; 4th, the union ; 
5th, the highway district ; 6th, the so-called local improve- 
ment district, sewage district, etc. All these bits of mosaic 
are not placed side by side but piled one on top of the 
other ; the districts cross and overlap each other ; each 
particular unit has its own taxes, its own method of 
apportionment. One of them must at last swallow up all 
the others, establishing its accountability, its boundaries,, 
and its officials. Whichever one it may be, it will be 
governed by an elective body. The parish is too small to 
produce very good boards of administration j and as these 
boards can not do without salaried agents, the area of 
administration must be larger. The present union, the 
boundaries of which are fixed by the recent Poor Laws, is 
adapted to one of the most imperative needs of the country ; 
the Sanitary Act has already invested it with additional 
functions, and it is possible that it may gradually absorb 
all the offices of administration. One thing is certain, 
that local taxes have become enormous and that it will be 
necessary to devise some system of collection that shall be 
less expensive and a more equitable mode of assessment. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The People and Social Questions, 
I. 

PARLIAMENT has represented in turn the mih'tary 
and landed nobility, the upper bourgeoisy, the lower 
bourgeoisy ; at the present day it represents the entire 
people. The class living by wages has not yet sent to par- 
liament any artisans ; either it judges that its interests are 
already sufficiently protected, or it yields instinctively to 
the feeling of respect for aristocracy and wealth. For all 
that, English politics have gradually changed in character 
during the past fifty years, social questions have assumed 
a position more and more prominent. The crowd, the 
multitude, is not only flattered by ambitious demagogues, 
it has become an object of the most anxious solicitude on 
the part of statesmen. The legislator keeps his eye ever 
fixed upon that great sea of men called the people, watch- 
ing the slightest ripples raised by the wind, seeking to 
conjecture the profound and obscure under- currents. The 
English aristocracy experiences neither hatred nor con- 
tempt for the people ; nothing is foreign to it that forms a 
part of English humanity. The lord does not hesitate to 



THE PEOPLE AISTD SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 247 

box with the workman. There is a kind of equality, created 
by race and the insular position of England, that crops out 
through all the masks and fictions of hierarchy. The rev- 
olutions, already a thing of the past, involved only the 
aristocratic parties ; the levelers appeared only for a 
moment under Cromwell. High and low have never been 
separated by a river of blood ; there are no fresh mem- 
ories, as in France, keeping alive almost sacred hates. 
Envy has not been sharpened ; it has never dashed the 
throne to pieces, trampled down estates and castles in 
triumphant procession. Aristocracy, ennobled wealth, 
feeling themselves strong, protected against attack, are 
more good-natured ; they wield their patronage with more 
of regal grandeur, they are more equitable, more humane j 
they fulfil quietly the duties of their guardianship. 

England, gorged and surfeited with wealth, is like a 
huge caterpillar feeding upon the foliage and leaving 
nothing but a skeleton leaf. The bright, sparkling green 
that disappears beneath the invisible gnawing is the brave, 
strong race swallowed up by civilization and industry. We 
cannot tax the aristocracy nor the bourgeoisy with the 
evils endured by the English people ; but we should be 
astounded if, in view of such evils, they were not moved 
to pity and tormented with perpetual cares. What are 
constitutional problems by the side of the great problem : 
how to feed the people? Of what matter are political par- 
ties, if there is a hunger party ? The workman who leads 
his life of hard toil without catching a glimpse of the blue 
sky, who sees his wife and children — the only beings whom 



248 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

he can love — droop, grow pale, and suffer, recks little of 
Privy Councils, changes in the Ministry, of Lords, Com- 
mons, and the Constitution. It has often been said that 
government was made for the people, not people for the 
government. The office of government is not, it is clear, 
to make the happiness of the citizen, but it is the office of 
government to diminish as much as possible the misery 
and suffering of mankind, to give somewhat of liberty to 
mind and body, to gather up the dead and wounded on 
the battle-field of life. We must always keep in mind that 
this frail and complex mechanism which we call the State 
cannot, in final resort, dispense with the virtue and good- 
will of all, with perpetual and universal renunciation and 
sacrifice. The wild beast that dwells in each one of us, 
cast upon the earth with his rude desires, instincts, appe- 
tites, makes himself the slave of a law, the servant of an 
ideal, a faith, a principle. The more the individual owes 
to society, the more society in turn owes to the individual. 
Man approaches to moral perfection only when he has 
ceased to think of himself, has given himself up to his family 
and his friendships, to some doctrine, some work. The 
maxims of Christianity, it is very true, are far from having 
pervaded the politics of the nations called most christian j 
there can be no absolute indifference to the world among 
governing classes, political parties, statesmen, and sove- 
reigns. But those in whose hands birth, tradition, and 
wealth have placed the moral government of England have, 
at least in our day, a rather strict sense of their duties. 
Books, newspapers, sermons are incessantly displaying 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 249 

before their eyes the obscure drama of popular life. In 
Dickens, for instance, there is an almost feminine tender- 
ness for whatever is lowl}', suffering, wretched, squalid, for 
those who hunger and thirst after goodness, for the beg- 
gars of fortune. Charity is not always so gracious ; more 
frequently it is surly, growling and playing the pedagogue, 
bristling with figures and satisfies or cloaked in ponderous 
dogmatism. There is a sort of philanthrophy that is 
nothing more than a trade and serves as a mask for the 
most ungenerous ambitions ; pompous and irritable, it 
seeks rather to tyrannize over public opinion than to alle- 
viate suffering. But its very absurdities and excesses only 
serve to show the power that the spirit of charity has 
acquired in English society. 

This society has, from the earliest times, discriminated 
between misfortune and sloth ; it has acknowledged the 
claims of misfortune, but it has been inflexible toward 
those who are still able to work. It looks upon poverty 
with such horror that it repels the voluntary pauper ; it 
takes charge of the aged and infirm, but treats the able- 
bodied vagabond without mercy, like a stray dog or a 
deserter. There is no faith in the sanctity of poverty. 
Mendicity was one of the first results of the abolition of 
villenage. As early as Richard II., there were so many 
vagabonds that domestic servants and laborers were for- 
bidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to another. 
At the same time a portion of the revenues of the church 
was set aside for the poor. The Act of 153 1 (Henry 
VIII.) orders the justices of the peace, the mayors, 



2 50 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

sheriffs, and municipal officers to seek out the helpless and 
give them begging licenses, fixing their beats. Able-bodied 
{valiant) mendicants were to be whipped : They shall be 
dragged on a hurdle to the nearest town, stripped and 
whipped through the town until their bodies are covered 
with blood. (Oxford students were not permitted to beg 
without a licence). Those who were guilty of a second 
offence had their right ear cut off and received the basti- 
nado j for a third offence, they lost the left ear and Were 
beaten with cudgels. The statute of 1536 (Henry VIII.) 
sharpens even these horrible penalties. Private charity is 
restricted ; vagabond children of five years and upwards 
are put to forced labor. The third offence is to be treated 
as a felony and punished with death. The church had 
been until then the chief nurse of the poor ; she was the 
one, then, to be reached by persecuting poverty. An act 
passed under Edward VI. provides that any adult, whether 
man or woman, who is able to work but refuses to do so, 
shall be branded on the breast with the letter V and 
adjudged to the informer as his slave for two years. The 
master may fasten an iron ring around the neck, arm, or 
leg of his slave. 

This horrible law was speedily repealed ; the 43d 
Elizabeth became the foundation of subsequent legislation 
on the subject of the poor. This statute established the 
right of the infirm poor to assistance, and left the manage- 
ment of it to the parishes. Mendicants and vagabonds, 
were still pursued with ferocity. Under James I., 
dangerous vagabonds (landed magistrates sitting as 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 25 1 

their judges) might be branded on the shoulder ; 
a second offence was treated as felony without benefit of 
clergy. 

The law of settlement was passed in 1662 ; it prevented 
the laborer from seeking a market for his labor. " There 
is scarcely a man of forty in all England," says Adam 
Smith, a century later, ^ who has not been cruelly oppressed 
by this law." The laborers were, in fact, serfs of the glebe. 
The 17th George II. provides that a woman who shall be 
delivered of a child in any other parish than her own shall 
be publicly whipped and sent to prison for six months. 
The 32d George III. provides that the justices of the 
peace shall not give vagabonds their discharge until they 
have been whipped or imprisoned seven days. Personal 
liberty is the privilege of the proprietary class. 

Notwithstanding these cruel measures, pauperism 
spread like a plague over the country. Each parish turned 
away strangers but supported its own poor, who, in con- 
sequence of their right to assistance, had lost all sense of 
shame. A stupid system of charity without any soul, with- 
out any principle of discrimination, given up to red tape, 
confounded the poverty of cynicism with the poverty of 
misfortune. Honor, pride, independence became extinct 
among the laboring classes. There was a sort of premiurn 
on idleness, for the honest laborer saw himself at a disad- 
vantage as compared with one whose expenses were borne 
in part by the parish ; the soil was tilled by paupers whom 
the new agriculture had hunted up in their poor-houses. 
The revenues from the soil were eaten up by the parish. 



252 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



In 1833, the poor-rate amounted to two hundred and 
fifteen millions. 

The evil became so great that efforts were made to 
remedy it ; a new Poor Law was passed in 1834. An 
attempt was made to distinguish between genuine poverty 
and hypocritical begging, to find some practical mark of 
recognition ; those applying for relief were compelled to 
leave their homes and families and enter the workhouses. 
Wherever one parish alone was too poor to build and sup- 
port one of these pauper-hospitals, two or more were per- 
mitted to club together to form a unio7i. We often encoun- 
ter in England these big houses, built out in the open fields 
in a bastard Gothic style of architecture ; they are the con- 
vents where the disgraced pauper, separated from his family, 
is reduced to degrading labor, forced to pick oakum and 
break stone. Each of these workhouses is under the direc- 
tion of a committee of guardians, who submit their accounts 
to the central committee in London. The new law was a 
dyke erected against pauperism ; but its stringency has 
been relaxed little by little ; it is impossible to avoid giv- 
ing aid at home ; public charity cannot shut up all the 
unfortunate in prison, or be insensible to the more respect- 
able, the accidental and temporary cases of misfortune ; 
it cannot be always sundering family ties, the tenderest 
and often the only ones thatkeejj certain beings within the 
bounds of the human species. Each one of the 666 char- 
ity-prisons of the country serves at the same time as a hos- 
pital. But what hospitals ! Doctors, medicine, dispensa- 
ries, infirmaries, ever}'thing is insufficient. Grave mala- 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 253 

dies cannot be treated properly by an ignorant young 
doctor or a nurse who is scarcely able at times to read the 
prescriptions. The evil of poverty is preying upon the 
richest country in the world. Paupers are treated at their 
homes, when they cannot be put in the infirmaries. In 
1868, the poor-rate exceeded two hundred and fifty mil- 
lions."* Nearly three-fourths of the yield of local taxation 
were swallowed up in this gulf. There are, in round num- 
bers, 15,000 parishes in England and Wales. Each one 
has two overseers, who adjust and collect the poor-rates. 
This alone makes 30,000 employes. Each parish has at 
least one guardian, many of them have more than one ; 
these guardians receive the poor-rates collected by the over- 
seers. Let us add the collectors and assistants, number- 
ing about 2,000. There are thus at least 55,000 agents 
of public charity. If we bear in mind that, according to 
the last census, there are only 69,000 office-holders in Eng- 
land, we shall see that pauperism has almost as many 
servants as the government. 

* The total amount of local taxes at the present day amounts to 
about four hundred million francs. 

Poor rate ;^ii,364,ooo 

Buildings * 1,449,000 

Local government 923,000 

Highways, not including deductions from the poor rate... 770,000 

Municipal taxes 700,000 

Improvements 699.000 

Church rates 230,000 

Drainage 154,000 

City of London iog,ooo 

Sewers 70,000 

City police 51 ,000 

Lighting 41,000 

;{^i 6,560,000 



254 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



The population of England and Wales in 1766 was 
eight millions and a half. At the present day, it is about 
twenty-two millions. In 1777, the poor-rates were forty- 
three million francs. Thus the population has not quite 
trebled in one hundred years, while the pauper budget has 
become six times as large. 

On January first, 1872, there were 981,042 paupers 
entered on the rolls of public charity in England and 
Wales ; sixteen per cent, were in public houses of charity, 
eighty-four per cent, received support at their homes. The 
list comprised: ist. Male adults, 39,512 able-bodied and 
150,787 infirm. 2d. Female adults, 114,241 able-bodied 
and 283,616 infirm. 3d. Children under sixteen, 255,404 
of parents in good health and 84,474 of parents in ill 
health. 4th. Vagabonds, 3,378. 5th. Idiotg and lunatics, 
21,494, men, 27,427 women 1,063 children. On the first 
of January 1871, there were 104,619 paupers more than on 
the same day 1872. Pauperism, then, had diminished by 
a tenth. 

In London alone, that has a population of 3,250,000, 
according to the census of 187 1, there were in 187 1, on the 
average, 100,000 to 150,000 persons, according to the 
season, receiving public aid either at home or in charitable 
houses. In London, not more than a third do not receive 
aid at home, and the number of adults is slightly in excess 
of that of children. There has been a gradual falling-ofF 
of pauperism from 1869 to 1872 ; by contrasting the 
figures of one week with those of the corresponding 
week in the other years, we find that they had diminished 
12 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 255 

in 1872 by about a fourth. Thus^, during the fourth 
week of October there were aided, in 1869, 133,611 
paupers; in 1870, 131,200; in 1871, 115,474; in 
1872, only 103,208. The most wretched parts of Lon- 
don are those in the southern district_, Southwark, 
Lambeth, Greenwich, etc; then come: ist, the northern 
district, St. Pancras, Marylebone, Hackney, Islington ; 
2d, the eastern district, Shoreditch, Poplar, Bethnal Green ; 
3d, the centre district, Holborn, the City, the Strand : 
4th, the western district, where there is only one very 
wretched quarter, St. George. The tide of misery is now 
on the ebb. Statesmen find in the statistics of the poor 
the most happy confirmation of the policy of peace and 
commercial liberty that has been in the ascendant for 
some years. 

We may assert that in London five out of every hun- 
dred inhabitants live by public charity ; ten years ago, 
the number was only three. The innumerable private 
societies, hospitals, religious associations, charity-schools, 
spend, in the capital alone, one hundred and twenty-five 
millions annually ; by adding the poor-rates, we get an 
aggregate sum of from one hundred and seventy to two 
hundred millions. Assuming that each pauper, taking 
the average of men, women, children, able-bodied, and 
infirm, costs five hundred francs a year, London might 
keep as many as 400,000, But its immense charity-budget 
is badly administered ; it passes through too many hands 
and is largely unproductive. Still, imagine a city where 
poverty imposes upon wealth such heavy sacrifices. London 



256 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

is not so much a city as a province of brick and mortar, 
where three millions of men live and move. The bends 
of the great muddy river, the interminable streets, the 
labyrinth of cross-streets and alleys represent a cancer, as 
it were, spreading from year to year and eating away the 
gardens, the meadows, the green fields. What journeys we 
may make through these immense teeming quarters with- 
out ever knowing them really well ! Everywhere we find 
the same long rows of low, uniform houses of black brick ; 
everywhere we find the same ragged children playing on 
the doorsteps and in the streets ; on their faces, some- 
times still fresh, sometimes already withered, we may read 
an expression of indifference, but the faces of the adults 
are stamped with the seal of fate ; they bear the burden of 
life with a gloomy and almost savage air. Their misery 
is not a purgatory but a hell from which they no longer 
dream of escaping. 

Every capital is like a vise pressing together living 
beings and wringing out their suffering. Still, it is not in 
London that the mortality is the greatest ; far from it. 
The health-giving sea comes every day to wash away its 
garbage. But the workman, the pauper, has no decent 
lodging-place ; the home of which England boasts, the 
household oasis, the pleasant family retreat, is something 
unknown to him. The child lives out-doors, playing in 
the black mud and watching the quarrels and fights of 
drunkenness ; at night, he crawls into a corner of the pub- 
lic bed, where he warns himself against his brothers and 
sisters. He grows up ; learns a little about politics from 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 25? 

the newspaper placards, catches the distant echoes of great 
trials, of crimes, disasters, wars, battles. He is warmed by 
the inner sun of youth ; should he love, should he pick 
some flower that has opened by his side on its human 
dung-heap, where shall the newly married couple go ? To 
some house already swarming with tenants, where they pay 
dear for an empty room and an old bed. This is the hid- 
ing-place for dreary loves, delights of a day and pangs 
long drawn out ; children come, and there is no longer 
room. They must hunt up some other refuge ; even pov- 
erty has its hierarchy. Children bring discredit upon a 
house ; overgrown families, turned out by the landlord's 
agent, must migrate to quarters of even worse repute. 

The lowest degree of all is the Irish quarter ; a street 
once conquered by the Celts belongs to them for ever ; it 
is shunned by all who are not driven into it by inexorable 
necessity ; the Irishman alone plunges gaily into these 
haunts that resound with the din of bestial sport and the 
horrors of indecent, cynic, ragged intoxication. He pays 
two shillings and a half a week for the privilege of occupy- 
ing one room with his wife and children ; the rotten floor 
rests on the damp ground ; the broken windows are stopped 
with paper ; everywhere the rain leaks through ; the little 
court, shared by five or six families, is a dung-heap ; but 
sloth disports at ease in this fetid atmosphere, this hideous 
communism ; we might almost say that the Irishman does 
not know how to suffer. 

Most artisan families in the metropolis have only one 
room j a few have two ; the aristocracy of labor has three. 



258 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



Rents vary from three to eight shillings a week ; credit is 
rarely given for more than two weeks. A walk almost 
anywhere in London will give one glimpses at every turn 
of courts and gloomy alleys swarming, especially in the 
evening, with a melancholy crowd in tatters. The yellow 
light of the gas flickering in the damp west wind falls upon 
pensive faces tinged with a certain indelible sadness. 
What charming flowers here and there amid this gloomy 
mass of human vegetation, what pure features, noble and 
soft, bearing the imprint of childlike, christian grace ! 
And again what sombre faces, withered and worn, hewn 
by the rude hand of fate ! The forbidding houses are like 
tombs filled with the living. The subject of lodgings for 
workmen has become, in such a vast capital, a question 
of prime importance. If no answer be found, the workman 
will be in danger of relapsing, — in the very midst of civili- 
zation, — into barbarism. In London, industry is fettered 
by the law. How is it possible to put up good buildings, 
as long as the builder can not buy the ground and the 
house reverts, at the expiration of the lease, to the owner 
of the soil ? Houses are nothing more than tents. In 
Scotland, the lords of the manor for a long time have been 
obliged to abdicate their privileges, and cities have been 
built upon a system of ground-rents, which really creates 
a freehold subject only to an annual charge. Philanthropy 
alone cannot solve such a problem. We must change the 
surroundings, if we wish to change the man. It is not 
enough to build schools, for they do not comprise the 
whole of education. There is a teaching that goes on from 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 259 

day to day, hour to hour, in the sensations with which 
childhood is surrounded. The blackened walls of brick 
not only exhale humidity ; they also exhale ideas, a 
morality, a religion of their own. 

Despite everything, the man of the people loves Lon- 
don, this living ant-heap, the proud river covered with 
masts, the immense dome of St. Paul's looking down upon 
the City, the forgetfulness of sight-seeing, the flaring gas- 
lamps, the cries, the eager throng, the shows, the fleeting 
visions of wealth and beauty that embellish a capital. It 
is not easy to get him away from this loadstone. For a 
place in this great noisy world, he will give a fifth or a 
fourth of his wages. For the same money, he might have 
a cottage in Lancashire or Yorkshire. He. is still the 
victim of retail dealers and landlords ; the new ideas of 
association and cooperation that have improved the con- 
dition of the workmen in the manufacturing districts have 
not yet transformed London. The London populace is 
worse off, in a material point of view, but in spirit, in 
imagination, it leads a more intense life in the infinite 
black void of the capital. 



II. 



Industry derives its power from the organization, the 
division of labor ; it is always trying to reduce general 
expenses, to concentrate, agglomerate its forces. In the 
manufacturing districts, then, we must look for the type of 



26o ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

the veritable workman. The regiments of labor are organ- 
ized in brigades, divisions, and armies. The individual 
disappears, the soul is stifled, morals degenerate. Capital 
seizes even upon children. Before the passage of Sir 
Robert Peel's bill on apprenticeship, manufacturers sup- 
plied themselves with children from the parish, the poor- 
house, the metropolis. These children became slaves at 
the age of seven ; whipping was the only mode of punish- 
ment for them. Eighty women in a hundred in the manu- 
facturing districts do not know how to use a needle ; 
dresses fall to pieces for want of some one who can mend 
them. The workman who gets high wages is not ashamed 
to wear the tattered, filthy livery of abject poverty. Half 
the children have no stockings ; numbers of workmen have 
only two shirts. The most violent tempests, the most 
frantic onslaughts of the wind, do not move the sea below 
a certain depth ; even so there is a subterranean England 
unreached by any moral current, any breath of religion. 
In the very midst of Protestant England, with its mor- 
bid conscience and its importunate piety, the workman of 
the north, in Sheffield for instance, is a veritable pagan ; 
not a sceptical, amiable, sensuous pagan, but coarse and 
savage. His ideal is high wages, that will allow him to 
eat and drink more and idle away three days in the week. 
Yet he is intelligent, tough, hardy, unscrupulous, bestial. 
The women of Sheffield habitually use profane language. 
There is no prostitution ; its place is suppHed by universal 
and shameless debauch. Marriage often begins by concu- 
binage. Young girls become mothers at fourteen. Men 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 261 

and women indulge in promiscuous intercourse after heavy 
eating and still heavier drinking. 

The workmen of Lancashire have some culture, some 
humanity ; the Staffordshire race is ruder ; at Newcastle, 
throughout the entire mining district of the north, we 
encounter an almost savage spirit ; the character is as hard 
as iron. 

Roam through the streets of Glasgow in the evening 
and you will have before your eyes the evils that follow in 
the train of modern industry. The sight seems a dream ! 
Everywhere pale children only half covered by trailing rags, 
women with bare feet and legs. The native beauty of the 
race is obliterated and corrupted. The features are worn 
and debased, the gaze daring and immodest. Everywhere 
the wide-open doors of the gin-palace, where, by the light 
of the flaring gas-jets, men and women press around the 
bar and the flow of intoxicating liquors never ceases. 
There is drunkenness without repose. Here and there the 
dull, dingy, surging crowd flocks to some coarse show, 
some display of wax-like faces and glaring colors. Prosti- 
tution takes possession of the street, a prostitution that has 
rags for tinsel and soot for rouge. Opening on the main 
streets here and there, are gloomy alleys and courtyards. 
As far as our eye can reach, we observe human forms. 
What goes on in these dens ? Nowhere, not even in the 
most wretched quarters of Liverpool, have J seen a more 
degraded race ; among the children of the gutter, what 
pallid faces, what emaciated, bent, distorted bodies ; what 
horrible women with low foreheads and lack-lustre eyes, 



262 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



shrunk and shriveled forms ! Glasgow, receiving the pure 
and copious waters of Loch Katrine, tries to cleanse her 
human stables; but what moral springs will purify the 
souls ? Must civilization, then, reproduce barbarism ? 
Must the cloud of coal-smoke be a dense veil of misery 
and ignorance for millions of human beings ? The former 
serfs of the glebe had the blue sky, the sight of the hills, 
and woods, and fields, the fresh pure air, nature, that 
speaks so sweetly to the heart of man that even they who 
have been overwhelmed with the gifts of fortune always 
return to her as to the tenderest of mistresses. What do 
the serfs of modern industry have between the brick walls 
of their prison ? Energetic young men can flee, can 
emigrate, can defy the universe ; children and young girls 
remain a prey to the monster, helpless and unwilling vic- 
tims. Hence there is nothing more pitiable than the con- 
dition of children in the great manufacturing cities ; the 
State should watch over them incessantly, and we must do 
this much justice to England, that she has, in favor of 
children, overcome her instincts, that are so much opposed 
to everything interfering with labor. 

The industrial system has brought about evils that can 
not but move the generous heart ; industry has become an 
international battle. The cry is for production, abundant, 
cheap. General expenses must be reduced, and this 
necessitates the crowding of men into great ant-heaps 
where the individual disappears, becomes only a machine 
or a part of a machine. Life passes in a terrible monot- 
ony ; national greatness and wealth should not dazzle our 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 263 

eyes so that we can no longer detect the humble instru- 
ment of this grandeur and wealth. 

There is no evil without a cure in countries where there 
is a breath of liberty, where the christian soul shakes off 
the coarse fetters of the flesh and refuses to live by earthly 
pride alone. Pity and kindness are a sort of ultimate lux- 
ury, a refined delight dashed with remorse and terrible 
doubts. Charity becomes a sort of stimulant for minds 
that have tried and exhausted every source of emotion. 
The Englishman, rich, all-powerful, happy, or seeming to 
be happy, does not shrink from the defiling touch of 
misery, he does not flee from the sight of death or life that 
is little better than torture. We might almost say tnat he 
is attracted by evil, vice and crime, by the impure and the 
horrible. He will not rest in ignorance of anything ; he 
knows that steel does not lose its temper in the mire. 
He does not dwell in lofty, inaccessible fictions alone ; he 
lives upon earth, nil hiimanum sibi alienum esse putat,noX\i- 
ing is foreign to him that is human.* 

Christian faith and an almost morbid curiosity are not 

alone in setting charity in motion. Political economy, 

after having started the theory of production, has ended by 

discovering that of all products the most important is 

man, that the most precious instrument of labor is the 

workman. Social questions, bearing upon wages, the 

methods of organizing and utilizing savings, upon popular 

* It is worthy of note that English art does not disdain poverty 
and the workman. The novelists (Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Dick- 
ens, Charles Reade) write of the loves of the poor ; they depict sue 
cessfully idyls of the mine, the factory, and the workshop. 



264 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

education, lodgings for workmen, their health and well- 
being, have become the great questions, occupying most 
the attention of statesmen ; it is these questions, doubtless, 
that will engage all Europe for the rest of the nineteenth 
century. No one has the right to call himself a poli- 
tician, who fails to recognize their formidable impor- 
tance. 

England acts just as she has always done, without any 
preconceived resolve, without system. She brings her legis- 
lative action to bear only upon limited questions. When 
the condition of young apprentices excites public indigna- 
tion, parliament passes a bill regulating the employment 
of children in factories. Another time parliament will 
take up the so-called night-lodging houses, the sanitary 
condition of workmen's houses, or the savings-banks con- 
nected with the post-offices, where the workman deposits 
his hard-earned gains. The legislative power is very 
cautious and hesitating in interfering with private trans- 
actions ; it does not undertake to organize labor, but con- 
tents itself with reforming flagrant abuses. Industry, 
often blind and rapacious, is always ready to elude these 
ads^ to reject investigation, to protest against any inter- 
ference in the matter of mines, steam-engines and the like. 
But enlightened industry ends by giving heed to those who 
advise it to make sure of the safety and well-being of the 
workman, to obtain labor that shall be enlightened by 
education, proper rest, and the establishment of institutions 
attaching the laborer to some group, some centre, some 
fireside. What humanity counsels, the interests of public 



THE PEOPLE AiVD S0CL4L QUESTION'S. 265 

order will demand, the more imperatively the more exten- 
sive the rights conferred upon the people. 

Two principles have crept almost simultaneously into 
legislation, principles apparently conflicting : absolute 
freedom of trade, and protection to labor. The school of 
political economy was not less vehement in its protest, at 
the start, against the interference of parliament in the 
labor-question, than the Tories were in their opposition to 
the abolishment of the protective laws. But at the present 
day, the most obstinate are forced to admit that the reform 
brought about by Cobden and his friends has given an 
incredible impulse to capital in England. So industry is 
resigned to the spectacle of parliament passing laws upon 
working-hours and the employment of children, creating 
inspectorships of mines, engines, etc, etc. It contents itself 
with preventing the inspection from degenerating into 
tyranny.* 

Childhood, especially, is protected. In 1832, the 
Commissioners could report that the children employed in 
the different branches of industry in the kingdom worked 
as many hours a day as the adults ; children and adults 
at that time worked fourteen and fifteen hours, by day or by 
night. In fact, the child became a slave at the age of six, 
or even five years. The act of 1833 put an end to this 

*In 1871, there were only 12 inspectors 3,162 over coal mines, 
employing 360,874 workmen, adults and children, and raising 
112,875,725 tons of coal in the year. The number of accidents was 
about 1000. The utility of inspectorships has been demonstrated by 
the fact that the number of accidents has not increased for several 
years, although the yield of the mines has doubled. 
12 



266 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

barbarous regime \ it forbade the employment of children 
under nine years. In 1847, parliament went one step 
farther, by fixing a maximum of ten hours' work by day for 
children and women. Since 1867, this act has been 
extended to all factories without exception. Have com- 
merce and industry suffered from these restrictions ? 
During the last twenty-five years the working population 
has become healthier and more robust, and consequently 
more intelligent. People have almost forgotten that 
Robert Peel, then a Tory still, that friends of the people, 
like Joseph Hume, and many of the radicals were opposed 
to the Ten Hours Bill. 

Ceasing to protect agricultural labor, parliament began 
to protect industrial labor ; the inconsistency is only in 
appearance, for, by supplying the workman's child with 
cheap bread, it also gives him a chance to grow, and 
breathe, and become a man. 

There is no law regulating the labor of adults ; but, as 
a matter of fact, by making use of the right of combination, 
they have reduced the day everywhere to ten hours ; all 
work in excess of this must be paid for extra. At this 
moment, strenuous efforts are made to reduce the day to 
nine hours, and also to forbid the employment of children 
under thirteen. Parliament protects women and children ; 
the men protect themselves. They have discovered a 
weapon outside of the law, in the exercise of the right of 
association. 

Parliament repealed the old statutes that regulated the 
terms of apprenticeship in the various trades, that permited 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 267 

cities to send away v/orkmen who had not served as 
apprentices within their city-limits, and that authorized 
local magistrates to fix the scale of wages for their term 
of office. Labor is freed from all these fetters ; but the 
workingmen's associations have come back, by a round- 
about way, to the abandoned principle of protection ; only, 
they seek to give the workman the privileges formerly pos- 
sessed by the employer. They aim at regulating the terms 
of labor and apprenticeship. Narrow-minded and jealous, 
they have gone, in many cases, to terrible lengths. The 
committees of the workingmen's unions, tyrannical and 
irresponsible governments, have constantly resorted to 
threats, to the intimidation of refractory workmen ; in 
some cases, they have not even recoiled from crime.* 

The parliamentary investigation held at Sheffield, in 
1867, made some terrible revelations ; it brought to light a 
hitherto unknown world, ruled by terror and vengeance. 
Broadhead, the secretary of a petty union of one hundred 
and fifty members, was seen maintaining for twenty years 
the monopoly of his association by means of the most 
hateful crimes. 

But liberty of association has not suffered from these 
revelations. It was judged, and rightly, that it would be 
better to have these workingmen's unions public than 
secret. Not only can workmen combine to get higher 
wages, but they can entrust their interests to standing 
committees, and create a fund for strikes ; they give a part 
of their wages, threepence, fourpence, or even a shilling a 
* Consult the Associations Ouvrieres, by M. le Comte de Paris. 



268 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

week, to the savings-box of the union. It is not terrorism 
alone that swells the ranks of the union. Experience 
shows that these associations are more numerous in any 
one trade, the more that trade prospers. The workman 
feels instinctively that alone he is nothing. His labor 
gives him his daily bread ; the union gives him something 
more, hope, the sense of forming a part of a power in 
society, a spirit somewhat akin to that which animates the 
soldier in an army. His pride is enhanced ; he no longer 
feels himself held down by an insuperable weight in the 
depths where he passes his life. 



in. 



Let us render this justice to the English workman : he 
does not make an excessive use of his new rights. He 
knows how to wait. The new Samson, he has not, in a 
moment of wild despair, taken hold of the pillars of the 
temple to make it fall upon his own shoulders. He does 
not separate his own lot from national destiny, his own 
interests from those of the country. He retains, amid his 
sufferings, an almost touching respect for whatever repre- 
sents in his eyes the fatherland. He is not a soldier ; but 
if he does not pay the tribute of his blood, he gives at least 
his long-suffering, his obedience to law, his resignation. 
He reminds us of those miners who explore contentedly the 
depths of the earth for the metals that are to sparkle in the 
sunshine, or those frank spectators who, seated in the worst 



'THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 269 

places in the theatre, still enjoy the splendors of the 
scene. He will give his life, that England may be rich and 
free. Every revolution is a sort of usurpation ; the English- 
man detests usurpers, chance greatness, hollow idols ; more 
than any one else, the workman is accustomed to a cer- 
tain ratio of the effort to the result accomplished ; he is 
a stranger to chance ; his own life is regular and monot- 
onous, not swerving from a fixed line. There is a certain 
tameness even in his pleasures. Watch him on a holiday, 
in some public park. Pleasure, heavy with intoxication, 
celebrates a sort of peaceful and indolent wake of Arcadia; 
the workman, solitary, recumbent, will fix his gaze upon 
the turf for hours. With him, repose takes the place of 
happiness. 

The crowd can be aroused by some great passion ; but 
in public meetings, even those held in the open air, in 
squares and market-places, enthusiasm and indignation 
submit to rule and discipline. There is order in disorder. 
The chord most readily responsive to the touch is that of 
justice, the multitude is moved by whatever looks like 
oppression ; but we can not excite it much by speaking only 
to its envy : the soul of the people is not haunted by the 
recollection of recent triumphs, bloody victories gained by 
force and terror over law, mortal insults to all earthly 
grandeur. The workman has no Marseillaise, x\h chant 
of insulting defiance to Europe, (o royalty and the church ; 
no symbols, no Phrygian cap, no red flag. He does not 
behold an enemy, a foreigner, in the nobleman or the 
priest. He growls at times, but he seldom threatens. 



270 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



He is not far removed from nature ; never having been a 
soldier, he knows no weapons but his own sturdy hands. 
He is brutal without being cruel. His instincts are, by 
nature, correct ; they have not yet been sharpened, pointed, 
perverted by the sophisms and flatteries of the demagogue, 
by a literature of lies. Those who set themselves up as 
his apostles and guides have been drawn to him, so far, 
by the spirit of charity, rather than by ambition. The 
sufferings of the unfortunate, the poor and the lowly, are 
to them a subject of remorse and not the text from which 
to preach insurrection. They seek to serve the people, 
rather than to make it their servant. 

If we endeavor to sum up the principles of legislation 
upon social questions in England of to-day, we shall find 
that the State has broken, to a certain extent, with the the- 
ories that would derive all progress from the principle of 
utility and clearly perceived interest. Parliament has not 
had as much faith as political economists in the foresight 
of manufacturing lords and capitalists ; it has not seen fit 
to wait until the protection of women and children, the 
health of workmen, a sound system of hygiene should 
develop themselves, like a ripe fruit, from the foresight and 
intelligence of the producer. It has acted like those pro- 
fessed enemies of begging who can not keep their purse- 
strings drawn at the sight of a face bathed in tears. 

Nobody will deny, at the present day, the duty of the 
State to afford active and unceasing protection to children, 
to dispute the possession of them with ignorance, vice and 
rude, grasping industry. Forests are put under supervis- 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 27 1 

ion ; why not supervise mankind, and see that the budding 
forces and intellects are not cut down by the root ? The 
civilized State should seek to give the child something 
more than what is merely necessary to the muscular fibre, 
something more than air, water and bread; it should edu- 
cate him, if the father is unable to do it ; should give him 
the first and most precious instrument of labor, the means 
of instructing himself This grand problem of popular 
education, so long overlooked and slighted by parliament, 
has never been overlooked by the church. More than 
half the children who know how to read are indebted for 
this benefaction to the old national church ; the dissenters 
also have their schools. The State has not yet turned into 
a pedagogue ; it visits the school as an inspector, purse in 
hand, ready to give subsidies to those who have the best 
methods and make the most exertions. 

As to adults, the State judges that it has done enough 
in leaving to them, without restrictions, the formidable 
right of combination. It interferes in the domain of indus- 
try only to protect human life against imprudence or care- 
lessness ; it does not protect labor nor regulate its relations 
to capital. The working classes have obtained from the 
State all that it has to give : free trade, enabling them to 
purchase food at the cheapest rates ; liberty of association, 
enabling them to regulate their wages according to the 
profits of capital. Association and science must do the 
rest. Machinery, long regarded as an enemy by the igno- 
rant workman, is a mute ally. At Nottingham, the 
machines for making lace are run by workmen who earn 



2/2 



ENX?LAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



from fifty to sixty shillings a week ; notwithstanding these 
high wages, Nottingham is driving the poor denteUilres of 
Flanders out of the market. Every mechanical improve- 
ment brings with it an increase in wages ; for a more com- 
plicated machine has need of a more intelligent operative. 
In cotton-spinning, the machine that once employed two 
men at eighteen shillings each a week has been replaced 
by another employing only one, who earns twenty-five or 
thirty shillings. At the beginning of the century, the ordi- 
nary workman in the cotton-mills earned four shillings and 
a half a week ; at the present day, when working on full 
time, he earns at least ten and a half, and can easily work 
up as high as nineteen shillings ; a woman earns ten shil- 
lings, a boy seven, a girl five. 

In those districts where the operative is not nomadic, 
living is made easier by cooperation. A spinner can now 
get good and sufficient food for five or six shillings a week : 
add two shillings for rent and two for washing and clothes, 
and you will have a total of ten or twelve shillings for 
things necessary ; this would leave, for a good workman, 
ten, twelve, or fifteen shillings a week for the savings-bank. 
We must not disdain these petty details, these humble 
figures. The rate of wages and the uses to which they 
are put are the very life of the workman, and also the 
grandeur or the ruin of a civilized state. The spirit of 
organization, that first spent itself in the production of 
wealth, must now exert its inventiveness to ameliorate the 
condition of the producer. The workingman's town must 
be built, lighted, cleaned, and drained like a factory. 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 273 

Life becomes, of necessity, almost conventional. The 
kitchen converts itself into a laborator}^, the family budget 
becomes a part of one great budget. Is the family to 
disappear altogether in this great community of labor? 
On the contrary, a little comfort, decency of dress and 
habitation, modest savings accumulating in good keeping 
will only cement the family together more firmly. A pale 
ray of humble happiness suffices for an imaginative race ; 
" the mind is its own place," said Milton. The passions 
that make the family are so profound and so controlling 
only because they veil the world froui us for a moment, hide 
from us the poverty of our lot. 

The most terrible enemy of the English workman is 
drunkenness. It is difficult to preach temperance to men 
whose life is so hard that they are constantly tempted to 
drown remembrance. The Englishman does not need 
complete intoxication, he does not have the drinks that 
will procure it, whether in its gay, its maudlin, or its ter- 
rible manifestations ; his beer is both nourishment and 
stimulant ; it puts him into a strange sort of stupor, sel- 
dom depriving him of all his reasoning faculties ; it wraps 
his brain in a fog, through which flit dreams and visions. 

Since 1869, the average annual consumption of stim- 
ulants, alcholic drinks, tea, and coffee in England has been 
one hundred and twelve millions sterling, in which sum 
alcoholic drinks have by far the largest share. England 
has consumed four hundred and fifty millions sterling in 
drinks in four years, and spent only fifty-one millions in 
the purchase of cotton. If we reckon the yearly wages of 
12* 



274 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



a workman at eighty-five pounds (thirty-three shillings a 
week), the items of ex^Denditure will be as follow : forty 
pounds for food, seven for rent, twenty for fuel, clothing, 
and recreation, eighteen for tobacco and drinks. 

The taxes upon stimulants yield thirty-nine millions 
sterling annually ; almost half the budget. The workman 
pays in this shape, without knowing it, a much higher rev- 
enue tax than the capitalist. 

We feel that there is something artificial in this new 
industrial world born of modern times. Is there not some- 
thing strange and almost monstrous in the new ambitions 
that science has let loose ? In England are woven the 
goods worn by millions of men in China and Japan ; the 
country has turned itself into the workshop of the universe ; 
it has the itch, the rage of work. It can not conquer the 
world, but it seeks to make the world tributary ; it suggests 
to the most remote peoples wants and appetites that they 
knew not of. It teaches the dreamy Hindoo the value of 
time ; its thoughts traverse the globe in all directions in 
*' forty minutes." 

It takes upon itself a thousand useless tasks. Is this 
insatiable labor only a new phase of the fated and perpet- 
ual struggle of nations ? Or is some new ideal of society 
to emerge one day from this mass of effort, trouble, and 
enterprise ? The man of to-day makes matter his slave, 
yet is himself too much a slave to matter. Perhaps he 
will succeed, some day, in making a more equitable par- 
tition of labor and happiness, duty and liberty. 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 275 



IV. 



The peasant, the field-laborer, in England is only a 
workman. He is not an owner ; he has neither field nor 
house ; he hires his labor to the farmer, the tenant. Vil- 
lenage died away in England by the end of the sixteenth 
century ; the lord lived upon his demesne land, surrounded 
by free tenants and by villeins, inscribed on the roll of the 
court of the manor, who became, in the course of time, 
themselves owners, subject only to the customs of the 
court. Below the tenants or owners, were peasants, living 
on lands and in houses that did not belong to them. We 
may doubt whether the peasant of the present day differs 
much from the peasant of former ages. He is robust, solid, 
square-built ; he is slow in his movements, his eyes are 
vague, dreamy, and mild as those of oxen ; his feet seem 
planted in the ground. The mist and the wind beat upon 
him, he grows up in the furrow like a tree. We do not 
detect any traces of thought, anxiety, or perturbation in 
his expressionless countenance. The farmer on a large 
scale is a manufacturer, who looks upon the land as a 
laboratory and the peasant as a machine, less efiicient and 
more expensive than a machine of wood and iron ; he 
calls him a haJid, pays little attention to his brains or his 
heart. The life of the peasant begins in the fields, among 
the hedges and cattle ; it moves on as regular and monot- 
onous as the course of the seasons j usually, it ends in the 



2^6 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



poor-house. Beneath the mild and moist sky of England, 
living in the open air, wearing woolen garments, the peas- 
ant contracts few diseases ; but the rain makes him subject 
to rheumatism, from which he suffers cruelly in old age. 
His limbs soon stiffen and contract. 

The wages for field-labor vary according to the differ- 
ent counties ; in the north, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, 
the high wages paid in manufacturing have raised those 
for agricultural labor. The peasant of these counties, born 
on an historical battle-ground, is energetic, intelligent, 
sharp-witted, independent ; he would not submit to such a 
lot as that of the loutish inhabitant of Devonshire. In 
Yorkshire, th^ wages are thirteen shillings a week, and 
during the harvest they rise to fifteen and twenty shillings, 
and even higher. The farmer lets to the laborer a cottage 
and a small plot of ground for four pounds a year. In 
many counties, the wages are twelve shillings a week ; but 
these figures do not give the exact condition of the peas- 
ant ; to arrive at his income, we must add to forty-five 
weeks at twelve shillings, four weeks of harvesting at 
twenty shillings, three weeks of haymaking at the same 
price, and beer given either as beer or in the shape of 
money. The wife can also work for a few weeks on the 
farm, and eight to twelve weeks in the field ; the boy can 
work for forty-five weeks at two shillings and a half, for 
four weeks of harvesting at five shillings, three weeks of hay- 
making at three shillings. A ploughman or a cowherd can 
earn two shillings more a week. To complete the list, we 
ipusttake into account the so-called privileges of the parish : 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 277 

a bit of ground (allotment) is assigned to the peasant ; 
half the yield from it goes to paying the rent, the other 
half belongs to him, either to use or to sell. The right of 
gleaning also helps to swell his income, which aggregates 
about fifty-six pounds, or fourteen hundred francs.* 

There is one great obstacle to an increase of wages for 
field labor ; namely, the poor-laws and the system of 
charity that has been practiced in the rural districts for 
centuries. The peasants are accustomed to being paupers ; 
when their wages become insufficient, when their family 
becomes too numerous, they fall back on the charity of the 
parish and the union ; the lower the rate of wages, the 
higher the poor-rates, and vice versa. The land-owners, 
actuated by selfish instincts, prefer to eke out wages by 
supplemental relief, rather than pay a higher price for labor. 
The field-laborer is not free, strictly speaking, to offer his 
labor wherever he will ; he is kept back by a secret force, 
he is always in drearl of poverty and knows that the dis- 
tribution of charity is in the hands of the land-owner. The 
industrial workman, thanks to combination, has succeeded 
in treating with the manufacturer on a footing of equality ; 
he discusses the terms of his labor, which is regular and 
defined. But what can the peasants do ? They recently 
made an attempt in some of the counties for the first time, 
to form a combination. But they are too isolated, too far 
one from the other. Are they going to assemble, like the 

* A family composed of man and wife and six children spend 
about fifteen shillings a week in bread, cheese, butter, washing, tea, 
sugar, and schooling ; not counting clothes, drinking, and incidental 
expenses. 



2^8 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

Huguenots of old, in the desert, and listen to speeches at 
the road-crossings, by the light of the moon ? These lowly 
and scattered lives are bound down too much to the soil ; 
the passions that sway great crowds cannot spring up in 
the silence of the fields. And what shall the peasants 
demand ? How shall they draw up their claims ? How 
can they speak of hours of labor? Their labor is as 
uncertain as the seasons ; it stops, it increases, it varies 
incessantly. After days of hurry and trouble and inter- 
ruption come days of indolence that bring with them no 
fatigue. Hence the salaries vary from time to time in the 
year. It is more difficult, then, for field-laborers than 
for ordinary workmen to form coalitions and make 
clear and precise treaties of peace with capital. 

It is in the nature of things that the peasant who is not 
the owner of the field that he cultivates should become a 
sort of servant, almost a serf. His real master is not the 
owner of the soil, but the tenant. Does he occupy a better 
place than he did in the patriarchal organization of the 
olden time ? The tenant-farmer is an impatient, grasp- 
ing, restless master, often a stranger and a nomad. The 
peasant no longer knows the owner, sees him only from 
afar ; he is under the rule of a man whose only attachment 
to the soil is that of interest. He is the serf of an estate 
rather than of a family. Poverty binds him as closely as 
did ever hereditary affection for a family or na'ive feudal 
admiration. His home is confined, cheerless, gloomy in 
winter, often too far from the fields where he works. It 
is not astonishing, then, tliat population should desert the 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 2/9 

country for the city ; every centre of manufactures or min- 
ing acts upon the population like a suction-pump. In 
Yorkshire and Lancashire there is often a scarcity of field- 
hands. In the southern counties, where there is less 
industry, the peasants are worst off. Wages rise only 
when there is a competition between industry and agricul- 
ture. The farmer himself is forced to become industrial, 
steam takes the place of the old ploughs, the sowers, the 
sickle. The English landscape is beginning to change in 
certain counties ; the fields are immense ; the hedges 
that once formed a flowery net-work over the plain must 
disappear, and with the hedges fall the elms. The charm- 
ing disorder of the enclosures and the long green walls, 
forming a tableau at every step, is threatened with monot- 
ony. We scarcely see any more houses or men ; we 
seem to be wandering in a cultivated desert ; the land is 
a garden without a gardener. 

Emigration, also, is threatening English soil. It is 
surprising that it should be so slow at the present day in 
the country districts ; the English peasant, possessing 
nothing, might easily become a nomad ; ignorance alone 
keeps him from it. In Germany, the emigration move- 
ment increases only when stimulated by outside urgings, 
by help and advances of money from friends and relatives 
who have already prospered in other countries. The Ger- 
man, threatened with military service, sober and economi- 
cal, embarks at Hamburg for Pennsylvania, Illinois, Mis- 
souri, or Brazil, wherever he may be called, wherever he 
can find a sort of little fatherland. Nothing of the kind, 



28o ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

apparently, goes on in the families of the English peasantry. 
The soil holds them ; it possesses them, if they do not 
possess it. They are too poor to emigrate readily, and 
even too ignorant to have any knowledge of all those far- 
off Englands that attract only the most intelligent work- 
men, the most hardy farmers. Their wants, their desires, 
their ambitions are not great enough. We may ask our- 
selves what would become of England were the fever of 
emigration to infect the country districts. Has not nature 
made it for meadows rather than for fields ? It is moist 
from incessant rains ; its long-backed cattle, its horses 
delight in roaming over the herbage. It is no country for 
the vine or for crops that demand long summers. A land 
of shepherds rather than of ploughmen, it can furnish 
meat, but it has to buy grain. It has need of peace, a 
long peace favoring free trade. The Emerald Isle, bathed 
in the vapors of the ocean, can become prosperous only by 
diminishing its population still more. Cold Scotland 
has land upon land that no amount of patience can ever 
render fertile. We can force nature \ but in the long run 
she always resumes her rights. 

England is not by nature a country for small estates. 
Side by side with broad pasture-grounds, it must have vast 
fields made fertile by intense cultivation. The peasant 
will never become the typical inhabitant of Great Britian, 
as he is of Gaul ; he does not make his mark upon legis- 
lation or national history. The predominant spirit is still 
that of the great cities and ports. The diffusion of educa- 
tion in the rural districts will doubtless have the effect of 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 28 1 



disgusting with his lot the peasant who is now resigned to 
it. The muscular Saxon, slow and patient, will become 
more like the choleric workman ; he will shake off the 
condition which he now accepts as we accept the wind 
and the rain. He will demand higher pay from the 
wealthy owners of the soil. But we can scarcely suppose 
that he himself will ever become a land-owner. Laws of 
inheritance and succession may be changed, and taxes, 
but it is impossible to see how English capital, ever grow- 
ing, inflated by the conquests of industry and the tribute 
of the whole world, can be prevented from seizing upon 
English soil as its most precious prey, the most coveted 
adornment of wealth. The city workmen, who have now 
become a formidable power in the State, may, in some 
moment of revolutionary ardor, lay violent hands upon 
the English aristocracy, upon the constitution, upon capi- 
tal ; but they have no interest in confiscating the soil. 
They live remote from it, their thoughts are elsewhere. 
They have city passions, they keep close together, they 
are strangers to the pleasures of isolated possessions and 
solitary life ; what they need is life in common, noise. 

There is some occult relation, doubtless, between land 
and the limits of property, which relation may be impeded 
by laws but which will reveal itself sooner or later. Even 
in France, where the laws are so favorable to small hold- 
ings, we see large estates springing up, consolidating 
themselves wherever they are better adapted to improved 
cultivation. Agriculture can not escape the laws of trade ; 
it is not free from the operation of the rules that govern 



282 EN-GLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

capital; or the production and circulation of wealth. There 
can be no small holdings in forests, or large ones in vine- 
yards. Legislation can not materially change certain 
natural harmonies. 

There are no more political problems, so to speak, to 
be solved in England. Parliamentary government has 
been so long established that it works like a well oiled 
machine, without noise. Social problems are now the 
most important. The English mind, at once so innovating 
and so conservative, neither denies their existence nor 
despises them. It takes them up without preconceived 
opinion. Nobody fails to recognize the rights of labor, or 
denies to workmen the power of trying to raise their 
wages. 

What more natural than that those living by wages 
should combine ! The Middle Ages had their guilds ; 
why should not the workmen have their unions ? Have 
these associations become so powerful as to fix the rate 
of wages ? No, the rate is fixed by competition among 
those who employ capital. All that the union can do is to 
accelerate a little the rise in wages, when that rise is in 
the nature of things, and delay the fall somewhat, when the 
fall is necessary. This slight advantage is counterbal- 
anced by the expenses of the union and by the cost of 
strikes. The workman pays a sort of permanent tax, in 
exchange for which he obtains sooner than he would other- 
wise an increase of wages that was inevitable in the general 
condition of trade, or else he staves off for a while a 
- decrease that was equally inevitable. 



THE PEOPLE AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. 283 

Many workmen hope that the unions will have the 
effect of creating uniformity of wages. This is a mistake. 
In the building business there were 90,000 union members 
in 1870, and yet the wages of masons varied from 4I- to 7I 
pence per hour, bricklayers from 4^ to 8 pence, carpenters 
from 4I to 83- pence. The workingmen's-union, in fact, 
operates only as the governor on a steam-engine, prevent- 
ing too sudden changes in the rate of speed. 

English industry with its wide-reaching ambition does 
not live by small profits, it does not seek to obtain its 
returns from the insufficient recompense of the operative. 
Capital aims at the consumer, it rather sides with the 
workman ; in crises it is ready to make great sacrifices ; 
it will submit without murmur to bad years, in hopes of 
good years to come. Strikes in agriculture will doubtless 
never become very formidable, and even strikes in manu- 
facturing have not yet assumed a revolutionary character. 
They are only a rude and clumsy mechanical device, that 
accomplishes at the price of great suffering what enlight- 
ened industry must aim at bringing about spontaneously. 



CHAPTER VII. 
The Colonial Policy. 

EVERY great race feels the need of dominating ; it 
finds in its domination the evidence of its great- 
ness and excellence. Outside of England proper, shut in 
by the seas, so small that men quarrel for the smallest 
parcel, there is another England, scattered all over the 
world ; if ever the island should become a sort of forgotten 
land, if ever its aristocracy and monarchy, turned bour- 
geois, should seek only repose, if ever the country so long 
dreaded should seem to crave the mercy of Europe and 
ask only for the privilege of applauding the triumphs of 
those more powerful, even then the entire globe would rise 
up and bear witness to the ambition of Great Britain, 

I have said that a natural selection has been effected 
in this island so long free from invasion ; but this selection 
has not been effected under the ordinary conditions. The 
race has never been kept a prisoner ; it has always turned 
out of doors a portion of its offspring ; it has never 
received, it has always given ; the greater its purity, its 
singleness,^ts originality, the greater its fecundity. We 
may ask ourselves whether incessant emigration tends to 
ameliorate or deteriorate a race ; it takes from it whatever 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 285 

is most wretched and corrupt, and also at times whatever 
is most energetic, most vivacious. Be that as it may, 
England, threatened by Europe, compelled to keep the 
mastery of the sea under penalty of destruction, became at 
once the most expansive and the most insular power. 
Like Greece, Carthage, Venice, all great maritime powers, 
it has never defended itself better than by defending itself 
at a distance. An island is a citadel surrounded by a 
ditch j it must be protected by detached works. The 
Atlantic ocean is only a ditch a little wider than the 
Straits of Dover or St. George's Channel. As a great 
military power is doomed to conquests, so a maritime 
power is doomed to colonization. If it finds uninhabited 
countries, it will establish new societies, which, free and 
untrammeled, will develop with surprising rapidity ; if it 
encounters inferior races, it will destroy or subjugate them , 
its civilization will take root among civilizations in decay. 
The. Jus gentium is an application of the maxims of justice 
that passes current only among nations having a common 
stock of ideas ; Europeans establish themselves in distant 
countries, despite the Jus gentium that they themselves 
have invented, and the moment the native commits the 
least infraction of a code of which he is ignorant, he is 
punished with the utmost severity. 

The history of colonies is seldom written and never 
read. Our haughty Pharisaical societies, proud of their 
pretended morality, fed upon pretty maxims and lying 
phrases, willingly throw a veil of oblivion over those 
obscure struggles in which civilized man becomes once 



286 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

more a robber, a pirate, a beast of prey. Contests 
between Christian peoples are regulated by certain conven- 
tionalisms, and are waged in the name of exalted interests. 
Might takes pains to hide behind the mask of right, it 
would have men believe that it is the protector of the " 
weak and oppressed, the corrector of time-honored abuses, 
the sovereign sword of justice. Even as an oppressor, it 
seeks to convince ; it would fain compel the souls of 
men as well as their bodies. 

In the presence of so-called inferior races, these scru- 
ples vanish ; might seems to have no longer need of justi- 
fication. The vanquished millions submit to it as to a di- 
vine scourge, something incomprehensible and necessary. 
Certain races begin to decline the moment they find that 
they can no longer conquer ; they abdicate, surrender, only 
too happy if they can disarm the anger of some master and 
gain his favor. 

Yet there are few nations whose power has not been 
troubled by the agitations of some conquered race, cling- 
ing like a thorn in their side, too strong to be destroyed, 
too hostile to be converted. Ireland has been the run- 
ning sore of England ; it has been at once a dependency 
and a colony, it has never become the mate of the mother 
country. The Celtic spirit has found here its refuge, and 
maintained itself in all its purity, malignant, wild, supersti- 
tions. 

Ireland is to England what England is to Europe, an 
island. It is almost another world, so difficult a barrier 
to cross is the sea. Mountains are nothing by the side of 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 28/ 

the abysses hollowed out by the ocean and inhabited by 
the tempest. An eternal voice, now shrieking, now sigh- 
ing, forever says to the stranger : Be gone ! 

Where has there ever been a conquest more cruel and 
more insolent? Unlike other conquests, its effects still 
continue. The war between the Saxon and the Celt has 
never ended. A thousand circumstances have conspired 
to make the hatred between the two races unparalleled in 
its tenacity. The conquerors have not been forced to 
mingle with the conquered j they have not burned their 
vessels on landing. The umbilical cord connecting the 
conquerors with the mother country has never been 
severed ; the sons of the conquerors and the sons of the 
conquered were, only a century ago, just as far from one 
another as Normans and Saxons were, six hundred years 
ago, in England. 

Since the times of Henry II., the history of Ireland is 
only one long martyrdom. The Celts rejected the Refor- 
mation as soon as it assumed a purely Anglican shape. 
Henry VIII. confiscated, at a single blow, the estates of 
all absentees and gave them to residents. He tried Kil- 
dare as governor^ but finding him too Irish, sent him to 
the Tower ; Kildare's son. Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, 
revolted, and with his own hands beat out the brains of 
the venerable archbishop of Dublin, who was attempting 
to escape. Fitzgerald was executed. The king vainly 
distributed the estates of the convents and abbeys among 
the Irish chieftains. He caused himself to be recognized 
as king of Ireland and ceased to be a sort of papal viceroy. 



288 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

But the people, wounded in its inmost soul, clung to its 
altars, its ancient worship and rites. It began to look 
around for foreign allies ; it became the subject of Rome. 
It has always confounded two causes, Irish independence 
and the Catholic religion. Elizabeth extended to Ireland 
the new religious laws made for England, but they remained 
a dead letter. She had neither an army with which to 
subjugate the country completely nor a clergy that could 
convert it. It is a subject of astonishment that a nation 
should not have thrown into the sea a petty English gar- 
rison of fifteen hundred men at the most. But the Irish 
chieftains were perpetually making war on one another ; 
Elizabeth had only to foment their discords and keep alive 
the bloody anarchy. James profited by aft insurrection 
to make a sweeping confiscation ; he sent into the north- 
ern counties ten thousand farmers and workmen, with 
their wives and children. Ever since then there have 
been two populations in the island : the Catholic clans, 
semi-barbarians, and the Calvinists of Ulster, fanatic but 
industrious, Strafford attempted for a moment to pacify 
Ireland ; he convened an Irish parliament at Dublin in 
1639 ; the Catholics were masters of the Upper House ; 
the Commons were Protestant and Catholic in about 
equal shares. This parliament voted money for raising 
a royal army of 9,000 men. But Strafford was recalled 
before he could organize it. 

In 1641, the population of Ireland was composed, 
according to Sir William Petty, as follows : in a total of 
1,500,000 inhabitant's there were 1,200,000 Catholics and 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 289 

300,000 Protestants, of whom 200,000 were Ulster Non- 
Conformists and 100,000 Anglicans, Cavaliers, Tories, the 
king's party. The Catholics were not all Anti-English, for 
the Anglo-Norman barons established in the island had 
not united with the Irish chieftains, Celts by race. The 
insurrection broke out November fifteenth, 1641 ; it was a 
prolonged St. Bartholomew. The massacre was frightful ; 
the Irish boasted of having slaughtered 150,000 heretics 
(probably the number did not exceed 40,000). The 
rebels soon fell out among themselves, and the civil war 
lasted nine years ; in 1650, the population of the island 
had been reduced by a third, to 900,000. Ormond suc- 
ceeded in overcoming all resistance and collecting a fine 
army ; it seemed as if Ireland would at last have no mas- 
ter but itself. But Cromwell landed in 1649, with 14,000 
men ; he reinforced his army with the Dublin garrison, 4,000 
strong, took Drogheda by storm, put 3,000 men to the edge 
of the sword ; Wexford was taken in the same way ; at the 
end of a year, Ormond's army had disappeared and the 
quiet of the grave reigned in Ireland. Cromwell restored 
Ulster to the English colonists, confiscated all the estates 
of the rebels, and left them only one province out of four, 
Connaught, where they were shut in and isolated ; he gave 
lands to all his soldiers, and called in Flemings and 
Huguenots. He abolished the Irish parliament and incor- 
porated his conquest with England. He organized the 
subjection and meditated the destruction of an entire 
race. 

The genecosity of the restored Stuarts gave the Irish 
10 



290 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



Strength to struggle against their conquerors, but not 
enough to shake them off. Connaught ceased to be a 
prison ; many estates were restored to the former owners. 
The Episcopal Church was reestablished, and also the 
Catholic. The Puritans, in their turn, were confined to 
one province, Ulster. Hence Ireland, as we know, was 
the last stronghold of James II. ; but it fell with him at 
the battle of the Boyne. William, more generous than 
Cromwell, suffered the Catholic religion to exist, and con- 
tented himself with distributing a few lands to his favorites. 
He promised that the Catholics should enjoy all the priv- 
ileges in the exercise of their worship that they had had 
under Charles II. But they were declared ineligible for 
political officers, for the army, or for the corporations. 
The law continued to be vindictive and malicious. 
Even the commerce and industry of Ireland were perse- 
cuted. In 1683, the importation of Irish cattle into Eng- 
land was prohibited. In 1698, the exporting of Irish linen 
was forbidden, under penalty of death. Undressed linen 
could be sent only to England. In 1704, Ireland, in order 
to place itself on an equal footing of commerce, asked to 
be united with England, and the request was refused. 

Archbishop Boulter, who was the real governor of the 
island from 1724 to 1742., wrote to Newcastle: "I beg 
that your grace will use your influence, that henceforth 
none but English are put into high positions." There 
were some Anglican priests who held as many as sixteen 
livings. The bishoprics were given to corrupt men. 
Swift said jestingly that the English ministry always took 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 29 1 

care to select irreproachable men for the Irish sees, but 
that these saintly priests, by some strange fatality, were 
always assassinated on Hounslow Heath by robbers who 
took their papers and canonicals and crossed over to Ire- 
land in their place. 

Famines have already become periodical. What can 
become of a country delivered over to an aristocracy that 
swallows up everything and gives nothing, to a lazy herd 
of agents, bailiffs, sub-bailiffs of every grade, squeezing the 
tenant to the very last drop. 

During the eighteenth century, Ireland had a parlia- 
ment. But what a parliament ! Its laws are sent to it all 
cut and dried ; the peers are always off, spending in Eng- 
land the money that their agents have extorted from the 
humble tenants; the Upper House is composed almost 
entirely of the bishops of a religion detested alike by 
Catholics and Presbyterians ; the Commons are the tools 
of an oligarchy of conquerors. An electoral reform might 
perhaps have been the remedy for so many evils, but the 
patriots wished complete independence. Ireland, half 
dead, did not take the first step for the Pretender, either 
in 1 7 15 or in 1745, but the revolt of the American colo- 
nies and the French Revolution prepared the way for a new 
rebellion. The Presbyterians and the Catholics rose 
together ; but the revolt quickly assumed the character 
of a Catholic insurrection, the northern Protestants laid 
down their arms, and fifty thousand victims were once 
more sacrificed to the chimera of independence. 

It was the last great effort ; then as ever Ireland had 



292 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



tried to shake off her chains, then as ever her own children 
had been divided, treason had crept into their ranks ; there 
is no history more deplorable in its sanguinary monotony 
than the history of this martyr nation, that can neither love 
nor expel its conqueror. The only justification of force is 
peace, and England has never succeeded in bringing peace 
to Ireland. She has been content with dealing a few ter- 
rible blows from age to age, appearing for a moment, 
terrible and cruel, and then disappearing. Elizabeth, 
Cromwell, and William have done either too much or too 
little. They have introduced Protestantism into Ireland, 
without subjecting everything to it. English historians 
seek to excuse themselves by saying that free, parliament- 
ary England, jealous of her kings, would not give them 
large standing armies, and that such a large army is the 
only thing that could have reduced Ireland, and strangled 
hydra-headed remembrance, hate, and tradition. The un- 
fortunate island has always had either too many Catholics 
or too many Protestants. United for a moment against the 
English, they always fall out when they think that victory 
is at hand. Could an electoral reform have been effected 
in Ireland before it was in England ? Could the Irish 
parliament, not representing the people, do anything for 
that people ? Was England to practice tolerance toward 
a nation that was ever in rebellion, before she emanci- 
pated her own Catholics ? She was condemned to keep 
and at the same time to aggravate her conquest, to be 
alternately generous and furious. England would gladly 
have said to the Irish : Either make yourselves free or 



THE COLONIAL POLLCY. 



293 



remain subject. She denounced the divisions, the perfidies, 
the acts of cowardice by which she herself profited but she 
did not dare to ask herself whether this corruption, this 
ineradicable contempt for law and order, this folly baffling 
wisdom were not her own work. She continually felt that 
she was surrounded by invisible enemies, almost invincible 
powers of imagination. Ireland not only solicited allies from 
all the enemies of England, from Spain, France, Rome, the 
United States, but she had silent allies in the remembrance 
of victims and martyrs, in fields soaked with blood, and 
even in heaven. She long remained what Gaul was when 
conquered by Rome and by the barbarians ; the priests 
were her real leaders. It is not so very long since the 
peasant would say to the traveller : Here we leave Father 
M.'s country, or, Here we come to Father N.'s. The pope 
is the distant sovereign ; the Catholic faith is nourished 
by the most sacred sentiments of the human heart, by 
hatred of injustice, by devotion to one's forefathers ; the 
Irishman loves with equal fervor his celestial country and 
his terrestrial. What heart can remain unmoved at the 
sight of those long and fruitless struggles of a poetic, 
ardent, inconsolable race ? 

The revolt of 1 798, as usual, was extinguished in blood. 
Cornwallis, who suppressed it, was terrified at the ferocity 
of the conquerors ; Castlereagh, himself an Irishman, tried 
to reconcile the two countries, and purchased from the 
Irish parliament its own abdication for the sum of 
;^i, 260,000. According to his idea, this openly con 
ducted bargain was to be followed by the emancipation of 



294 EN-GLAiVD POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

the Catholics. Pitt also had embraced this idea, but 
sacrificed it to the religious scruples of George III. ; the 
act of reparation was not performed until much later. In 
reality, Ireland had not lost much in losing its parliament, 
but it did seem as if the measure of iniquity were full to 
running over, when it got nothing in exchange for the 
sacrifice. A House of Irish land owners would not have 
made such good laws, perhaps, as the Irish Poor-Law, the 
Real Estate Act, the Act on Irish corporations, the Act on 
the English Church in Ireland, the Education Act, passed 
in our times at Westminster. But these laws came only 
after the horrible famine and exodus, as a sort of expiation 
and act of repentance. The Irish members constitute in 
the imperial parliament a small army, that can show its 
strength only as it throws itself on one side or the other ; 
still, Ireland has scarcely a right to complain of its repre- 
sentation. The English Constitution does not admit of 
political power proceeding from mere numbers ; yet we 
can see that the population of Ireland, forty years ago, 
was one third of that of the United Kingdom, and to-day 
is only one sixth, while the number of deputies remains 
the same. The evils of Ireland are scarcely such as can 
be cured by more equitable and humane legislation. The 
heart is still in revolt, after the reason has been half sat- 
isfied. Ireland detests the physician even more than it 
does the disease, and would like to reject every remedy. 
Cherishing proudly the remembrance of its long humili- 
ation, it knows itself to be still despised ; it detects the 
secret contempt lurking behind the wisdom of statesmen 



THE COLONIAL POLICY 



295 



who labor for its good. What would be the true remedy 
for its woes ? A little affection ; but it is a melancholy 
law of history that two races, two peoples can never love 
each other. England, now so powerful, constrained, as 
we must admit, to preserve Ireland within the orbit of her 
power, w^ould like to be just, and even generous ; but it is 
the chastisement of long persecutions that they seem to 
continue long after they have ceased. Moreover, will it 
ever be possible to accord to Ireland all that it claims ? 
To give any but incomplete satisfaction ? If the Catholic 
majority had complete power, it would confiscate all the 
estates of the Anglican church to its own use ; it would 
give the full property in land to those who are only ten- 
ants, it would hand over education to the Catholic clergy. 
In what respect does the condition of Scotland differ from 
that of Ireland ? Each has its representative peers, its 
deputies. Yet the one country is content, the other is in 
a constant state of irritation. It is because the one is 
Catholic, the other Protestant. 

The agrarian question is a grave one, but it is not 
incapable of solution ; the Irishman is not so bent upon 
acquiring full ownership of the soil as might be supposed. 
His dream is assured occupation and a low rent. The 
idea of property is not a Celtic idea. The Britains had no 
personal, individual property ; the land belonged to the 
clan ; the chieftain only took the largest share, like 
Achilles at the Homeric banquet. On the one hand, the 
Irishman does not quite understand the rather artificial 
system of hiring land for a term of years and paying a 



296 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



fixed rent settled by previous agreement; on the other 
hand, his ambition does not rise to the height of 
ownership pure and simple ; his hope hovers somewhere 
between the two. He is attached to the soil and would 
like a " good master," generous, lavish, patriarchal, and — 
above all — Irish. 

The family spirit, so strong among the Celts, acts as a 
clog upon the peasant. The small farmer marries young 
in life, the priests encouraging marriage as a means of 
preserving morality. He has numerous children. There 
is soon a whole family living on a small farm broken up in 
fields of three or four acres. The owner either becomes 
a sort of patriarch or patron of a family ever growing in 
numbers and misery, or he is forced to protect hims-elf by 
cruel ejectments. 

In the Protestant province of Ulster there is a special 
law. The owner is bound to accept as his farmer (tenant) 
any one who has purchased the " rights " of the out-going 
farmer. In this part of Ireland, the land is not broken up 
into wretched parcels, but subdivided into small farms of 
fifteen or thirty acres. There is flax-spinning and linen- 
weaving, and manufactures have always flourished, even 
at a time when the jealousy of England had succeeded in 
suppressing industry in the rest of the country. 

Time will heal the wounds of Ireland. The Anglican 
church has just been despoiled of its privileges ; legislation 
has facilitated the sale of property encumbered with mort- 
gages. The chimerical plans of those who would expro- 
priate all Ireland to sell it back to the occupants of the 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 297 

soil will be rejected ; but the lot of the tenants will become 
less precarious. This island, kept green a^nd moist by 
rain and mist, has been too much subdivided ; an island 
for shepherds, it had become a land of tillage; its peasants 
fought for patches of earth that could not support them. 
The great Irish exodus has perhaps been the salvation of 
the country ; emigration will continue until Ireland 
becomes rich, prosperous, and happy, until her hereditary 
hates have been allayed, until at last she becomes English. 



II. 



Besides the British Isles, the political unity of which is 
now assured against every attack, England has two sorts 
of possessions. Even the Greeks made a distinction 
between colonies that were only permanent garrisons, and 
such as were republics like the metropolis. So we can 
distinguish two eras in the history of colonial government : 
first, the era of monopoly and protection ; second, the era 
of commercial liberty. Up to the present century, 
England, following the example set by Spain, France and 
Holland, reduced the commerce of her colonies to a state 
of servitude ; she put forward exclusive pretensions to sup- 
plying their wants, kept their products as much as possible, 
prohibited all industry outside of her own borders ; she 
demanded the raw material, and gave in exchange the 
manufactured product. Even those colonies that enjoyed 
full political liberty had, for a long time, no commercial 
13* 



298 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

liberty ; as an offset, England did not demand tribute, as 
Rome and the Greek cities had done. The colonies 
really paid tribute, in the shape of indirect taxes, but they 
had no direct taxes. When England tried to impose a 
stamp-tax on her American colonies without the consent 
of their legislative chambers, she drove them to revolt. 
How could the principle which is the very essence of par- 
liamentary life, to wit, that the nation shall pay to the 
sovereign only such taxes as are voted by Commons freely 
elected, how could this principle lose any of its force by 
crossing the seas and establishing itself among communi- 
ties which, unreached by the rays of royalty and aristoc- 
racy, had become veritable republics ? 

England has learned at the present day that the more 
complete the liberty of her colonies, the firmer is their 
fidelity. She is satisfied with having these distant repub- 
lics accept from her their governors, who play the useful 
part of arbiters between parties. They are like constitu- 
tional kings, they drop from the sky for a few years, hav- 
ing no children, no ambition, no interests. 

One of the special characteristics of these colonies, 
that constitute so many independent States, is a natural 
tendency to form themselves into confederations. The 
American colonies have become the United States; the 
Canadian colonies, without shaking off English rule, have 
became the Dominion ; the Australian colonies are a 
powerful federative empire in embryo ; the colonies of the 
Cape are trying to coalesce. Petty settlements, humble 
and obscure places of refuge at the start, become provinces ; 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



299 



these provinces become States. In one sense, there is no 
longer any but an imaginary bond of union between these 
provinces and the h'ttle English monarchy ; but the forces 
of imagination are the most subtle and the most tenacious. 
The affection felt by the colonist, the resident of the Cape, 
of Australia or New Zealand, for the mother country is akin 
to the love of the exile for his native land ; the sight of 
the English flag awakens in all these exiles of Europe a 
world of sad and tender thoughts ; it is to them what the 
Cross is to the Christian, the Crescent to the Mussulman. 
One does not wish to be alone in the world, despised, for- 
gotten ; it is not enough to be rich, to own immense herds, 
to be monarch of all one surveys ; the soul feels the need 
of national instincts, of pride of race. The German, grown 
rich in Illinois, loves to return omnipotent to the land 
whence he departed a beggar. The Australian exults on 
entering the venerable banks of the City, his letter of 
credit in his hand. Steam has brought together the ends 
of the earth ; we can read in the Tiuies the ?'estime of par- 
liamentary debates at Sydney, Melbourne, Victoria ; peo- 
ple at the Cape or in Montreal wish to know who is dining 
with the Queen of England. The press carries a bit of 
England with it to ajl quarters of the globe, wherever the 
English language is spoken. Is there any essential differ- 
ence between the colonist at the antipodes and the Leices- 
tershire peasant who has never seen the Queen nor the 
Lord Chancellor ? What difference does it make whether 
one is a hundred or three thousand leagues from the 
capital ? 



300 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



There is a sort of ideal England, then, the continuity 
of which is not to be broken by wide oceans, by continents, 
by mountains ; like Rome, London is a pole of the moral 
world. Fortunately there are mystic forces struggling 
without cessation against low and grovelling egoism. 
Peoples have need of an ideal, a history ; they like to live 
in the past as much as in the present ; glorious memories, 
great names are among the earliest impressions of child- 
hood. A country like Greece takes comfort of her dimin- 
utiveness in having a history ; her name stands for high 
art, a grand literature. The United States, so jealous of 
.their independence, the masters of an immense continent, 
are always led back to Old England by secret affinities ; 
even the explosions of their hate have an element of 
love. 

The tie that unites all these societies to the present 
stock, however, is not merely an ideal one. Political sub- 
ordination has been attenuated as much as possible ; but 
there are other forms of dependence. The most impera- 
tive need of young societies is credit; what they are most 
deficient in is money. England has continued to be the 
banker of her colonies ; she becomes their silent partner, 
discounts their drafts on the future, subscribes to all their 
loans, furnishes them with the means of building railroads 
and docks and developing their natural resources. Three 
columns of the quotations of the London Stock Exchange 
are filled with names known outside of England only to 
the geographer. Men buy and sell every day the stocks 
of New South Wales, New Zealand, Queensland, South 



THE COLONIAL POLICY, 



301 



Australia, Victoria, shares of railways in Canada and 
Melbourne and Tasmania, mining companies in the most 
remote quarters. All the colonies are under the industrial 
and commercial patronage of England ; every earnest 
undertaking is encouraged ; money, which commands 
only a low rate of interest at home (Consols yield only three 
per cent.), can find more remunerative employment in the 
dependencies. In a new country, capital increases with 
astonishing rapidity, but money is always scarce; it can 
not remain idle for a moment, there are too many tempta- 
tions, there is always something to buy. The gold of Cal- 
ifornia and Australia can not remain in California nor 
Australia ; it is a merchandise, to be exchanged quickly 
for others more necessary. Commercial relations, regu- 
lated by the laws of supply and demand, could and would, 
no doubt, outlive mere political relations ; but the politi- 
cal bond of union, that has now become so slight and flex- 
ible, is interwoven with social ties, all those ties that 
spring from community of language, of race, of feeling, of 
associations ; and who shall affirm that commerce does 
not profit by so many and so intimate alliances 1 

Economists have figured up what the colonies cost the 
mother country ; they are no longer willing that England 
should build forts or furnish armies for the colonies; they 
are free, let them defend themselves ! A protracted war 
would, without a doubt, put the loyalty of the colonies to 
a severe test. If the United States should go' to war with 
England, Canada would necessarily become a battle- 
ground. Would Australia, that can not throw the least 



302 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL, 



weight in the scale of European ambitions, suffer her com- 
merce, her prosperity, her future to be at the mercy of those 
ambitions? England has the care of souls, so to speak, 
for the universe. She feels that she is everywhere vul- 
nerable ; she herself has loosened the ties that bound her 
to all these distant states ; she has given up her commer- 
cial privileges ; she has ceased to send transported felons 
to colonies that were no longer willing to receive them ; 
she has abandoned her right of patronage, her royalties in 
unoccupied lands ; her sovereignty is little more than 
nominal; still it exists. Should some maritime power or 
some coalition of maritime powers declare war upon Eng- 
land, she would find it to her^advantage to have her col- 
onies counted as neutral powers, and the colonies them- 
selves, if the contest proved to be a long one, would be 
desirous of obtaining the advantages of neutrality. But 
the belligerents will not treat the colonies otherwise than 
as enemies, and the more they fail to reach the heart of 
England, the more they will endeavor to wound her at the 
extremities of her empire. Dragged into a contest that 
they could neither foresee nor prevent, victims of some 
fault that they did not commit, these great confederations, 
peaceful, industrious, almost free, will be tempted to 
become free altogether. The yoke of England is no longer 
felt ; the moment it has to be felt anew, it will become 
almost intolerable. Still we must not imagine that the 
British empire is one of those that crumble in a day; it 
would argue little knowledge of human nature to suppose 
that it is capable of following only its instincts and inter- 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



303 



esls. The United States, — or what was then the United 
States, — were farther off from Europe in the last century 
than they are to-day. Neither the descendants of the 
Puritans nor the sons of the Cavaliers were pleased with 
England ; yet they remained true to her as against France. 
For seven years the colonies kept up an army of 25,000 
men at their own expense. During a protracted war they 
cost England, in the words of Franklin, " only pens, ink 
and paper." 

The American colonies aided England in the acquisi- 
tion of Canada; they sought their independence only 
after they felt themselves wronged by the mother country. 
At the present day, England scrupulously avoids giving 
the least umbrage to the jealous pride of her colonies. 
She does not force upon them any political system. In 
1850, the constitutions of the Australian colonies were 
revised. Each one obtained a House of which one third 
of the members were appointed by the Crown and two 
thirds were elected by electors subject to property qualifi- 
cations (2,500 francs in real estate or 250 francs rent). 
The colonial budget was charged with a fixed sum for civil 
administration, the judiciary, and the official church. The 
governor, assisted by his legislative council, had the tight 
of amending the constitution. There being no aristocracy, 
no Upper House, the colonial governments naturally 
drifted toward democracy ; so the property qualification 
was speedily abolished, and the secret ballot adopted in 
Australia long before it was in England. England did not 
seek to interpose the royal veto between the wishes of the 



304 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



Australians and a constitution more democratic than that 
of the United States. On the contrary, she permitted 
representative governments to be established in New Zea- 
land and at the Cape of Good Hope. Statesmen could 
not feel any admiration for constitutions that practically 
conferred uncontrolled power upon a single legislative 
body chosen on the basis of universal suffrage. In demo- 
cratic societies, the only way of constituting an Upper 
House is to unite several states into one confederation, 
and then to bring together in a senate like that of the 
United States the ambassadors of those States. For this 
reason, England must encourage everywhere the spirit of 
confederation among her colonies \ she can not keep them 
divided in order to reign over them ; she will show more 
real wisdom by permitting them to coalesce. She has 
already favored the Canadian Dominion, through fear of 
the United States ; she can not prevent the Australian colo- 
nies uniting one day to found a great continental empire. 

However long deferred the day of separation may be, 
it will come ; England will look from afar upon the tri- 
umphs of those civilizations the first seeds of which she 
has sown. She will be like a mother no longer recognized 
by her children, or rather like those inventors who behold 
immense fortunes built up by the aid of some machine that 
they themselves have been the first to construct with pain- 
ful care. Steam and electricity are transforming the world 
far more rapidly than was possible before. The blows of 
destiny seem also to have become more prompt, more 
decisive. The wings of history beat more quickly ; man- 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



305 



kind is, as it were, out of breath. Could we sleep for a 
century, only for fifty years, would we recognize Europe 
on waking? England, living by the past, so to speak, 
affording to the Continent the only image of stability that 
it still recognizes, can not escape the universal laws of 
human affairs. 



III. 

A superior race can not do without some military 
establishment. The races that are given up to perpetual 
peace are more speedily overtaken by decrepitude. Con- 
tempt of death is the highest evidence that man can give 
to himself of his own excellence. Danger is necessary to 
the nation as well as to the individual ; it gives them tem- 
per. No race is, by nature, braver than the English. It 
meets every danger half-way ; it has invented sports and 
pleasures that are a standing invitation to death. Its 
young men are manly, they court exertion, contest and 
peril. But neither aristocracy nor people seek the formi- 
dable test of war, the most terrible, the most solemn of all, 
and the only one that assures and maintains the primacy 
of a nation or a race. Whether we deem it well or ill, 
the entire history of civilization may be summed up in 
the dates of a few days of carnage. We must know how 
to give and how to take death. Man can make no greater 
sacrifice than that of his life. And nations grow in great- 
ness only through the sacrifice, the immolation of the 
individual. 



3o6 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

But England has discovered outside the limits of 
Europe new scenes for the display of her military prowess. 
We should scarcely be guilty of exaggeration in saying 
that she is always at war in some quarter of the globe. 
Not only has she colonies, she has dependencies, she 
makes conquests, she rules by the force of her arms over 
immense regions. We rarely fail to observe, in the great 
pageants held at London, amid the representatives of Euro- 
pean dynasties and the British aristocracy, some face that 
recalls to us those grand remote empires where the Saxon 
race now holds sway. The red-haired Englishmen, 
dressed in black, without ornament, without side-arms, 
without grace of movement, must seem to be the real 
barbarian to these oriental dreamers, with their finely cut, 
delicate features, their blaze of diamonds and precious 
stones ; yet the stranger kings are slaves, their arms are 
but toys, their very splendor pays homage to the con- 
queror. 

The vast conquests of England have been,made without 
design, without preconceived plan ; crescit eundo. Com- 
mercial zeal opened a career to the instincts of rule of the 
race. The conquest of India began with the quarrel 
between some English and some French merchants. 
France of the eighteenth century, forgetful, terrified and 
disdainful, deserted its traders, while England protected 
and helped hers and soon saw how they might be of 
service to her. 

At the death of Aurungzebe, who annexed the Dekkan 
to the territories of the Great Mogul, the empire began to 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



307 



break up. Something like a feudal state was established. 
The terrible invasion of Nadir Shah (1738) revealed the 
weakness of the ancient monarchy. A kingdom was 
established, having Hyderabad for its capital and embrac- 
ing a large part of the Dekkan; in the north and north- 
west was the confederation of the Mahrattas j in the south, 
the kingdom of Mysore. The governor of Oude had made 
himself independent; the Rajpoots in the north, the 
princes of Coimbatore, Travancore, Tanjore, Cochin, and 
the Carnatic were nearly so ; also the Afghans, the Sikhs, 
of the Punjaub, the Goorkas, the Rohillas. 

The English Company, which was at first nothing more 
than an association of traders, was forced into becoming a 
political power by the end of the seventeenth century. 
Its agents began to make acquisitions of territory and 
demand concessions. War broke out in 1744 between 
France and England. Two handfuls of men fought one 
another for an empire. La Bourdonnais, Dupleix and 
Bussy contended against Clive. French soldiers were the 
first to beat the armies of the Great Mogul. Dupleix 
exposed the hollowness of the great Asiatic powers. If 
France had supported him, or merely not thwarted him, 
he would have made himself master of the Dekkan and 
shut the English up in a few miserable factories. If the 
French of Chandernagore had not remained neutral in the 
quarrel between Clive and Surajah Doulah, Clive would 
have been lost, would never have recaptured Calcutta. 
But the Englishman had no sooner made peace with the 
cowardly Asiatic than he attacked and took Chanderna- 



3o8 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

gore. Then the Nabob perceived his danger; but it was 
too late. 

From these and the following events, in which the 
most hideous treason played the principal part and in 
which the Jus gefitiu?n was trampled under foot in the most 
audacious manner, dates the origin of English rule in India. 
Clive saw that it was necessary to place creatures of Eng- 
land upon the thrones, to make princes the instruments of 
enslavement ; his army spread terror everywhere and pil- 
laged the country. Clive took for his own share between 
two and three hundred thousand pounds, and considered 
himself quite moderate. The Mogul attempted to assert 
his rights of sovereignty over Bengal ; Clive threw aside 
the mask, he defended the vassal against the nominal 
liege-lord. The throne of Bengal was sold and re-sold ; 
the ransoms of princes, lacs of rupees were sent to the 
dingy counting-houses in the City of London. England 
found a country ripe for every civil, political, religious 
contest ; war became the purveyor of sordid avarice ; an 
easy war, for there was never anything more to do than to 
side with one party against another ; a war without a 
a truce, for the immense empire of the Mogul was long in 
breaking up, and the wave of conquest mounted slowly 
toward the Himalaya, like a tide that has no ebb. 

There is no power, so to speak, that is not tainted at 
its source. The rules of justice are really binding only 
on those who consider themselves equals. Every Euro- 
pean race, when brought in contact with races that it looks 
upon as inferior, uses without pity and without remorse 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



309 



every advantage conferred upon it by civilization. The 
English race, finding the races and religions of India 
involved in contentions, saw itself all the more powerful 
for being an alien. By a monstrous perversion of justice, 
it set itself up as the High Justiciary of the peninsula ; it 
substituted itself everywhere for the sovereign, conquering 
or purchasing titles of sovereignty ; in fine, it established 
order and peace in immense regions which, were its sway 
withdrawn, would certainly be given up to terrible civil 
wars. England represents that indefinable something 
called progress ; it plays in India the part that might be 
played in Europe by some new race that should make 
itself the guardian of public peace, that should extort a 
recognition of its supremacy from the French, the Germans, 
the Russians, taking their armies into its pay and allaying 
their inveterate hates and jealousies by its contempt or by 
its authority. 

Such enterprises, could they be foreseen at a glance 
in all their magnitude, would never be attempted. Had 
any one told Clive or even Warren Hastings that they 
were laboring to reduce two hundred millions of human 
beings to English rule, their audacity would have become 
hesitating. A sort of fatality urged on the arms of Eng- 
land from province to province ; she could not pause in 
her w^ork of conquest. Her empire being an empire of 
imagination as well as a conquest by force, she must 
startle by incessant and powerful blows the minds of 
peoples already subdued, of peoples still trembling and 
not yet resignca, finally, the minds of her neighbors. One 



3IO 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



conquest leads to another, one intervention to another. 
The name of England must become an object of terror 
throughout the East. Europeans are at this moment 
making their way into the Chinese Empire and Japan ; a 
fatality like that which seized upon England in India has 
already brought them under the walls of Pekin. The time 
will certainly come when the great peoples that now fill 
Asia and the island of Japan will look upon the English 
or the Americans as their true masters. In Java, the 
Dutch rule twenty millions of islanders with an army of 
twenty-five hundred men, well organized, recruited among 
the natives but officered by Europeans. 

The Sepoy rebellion came near putting an end to Eng- 
lish rule in India ; but the energy with which it was sup- 
pressed must have made a powerful impression upon these 
races that are so ready to bow to the blows of fate. Eng- 
land became more prudent, more considerate of the reli- 
gious prejudices of her native soldiers. Not that she had 
ever been oppressive, from the religious point of view ; she 
was rather ignorant than oppressive. Every conquest, 
however brutal it may be, seeks to justify itself in its own 
eyes ; but England, with all her religiousness, never tried 
to pass off her Asiatic enterprises as Protestant crusades. 
The earliest conquests in India were made at a time when 
religious fervor had been somewhat cooled down by phi- 
losophy. The Company defended only its commercial 
monopoly, and made no pretensions to a religious monop- 
oly. It established no propaganda ; it was tolerant, or 
rather indifferent, taking under its protection all the rites 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



and superstitions, recognizing all the religious establish- 
ments, and administering the revenues of Hindoos, Mus- 
sulmen and Parsees. The Christian successors of the 
absolute government of the Great Mogul sulfered Christian 
churches to starve ; there were Nestorians at Travancore ; 
they became Helots, like the Catholics in England. 

The first bishop of Calcutta was appointed only in 
1814; in the presidency of Bengal there were only nine- 
teen chaplains ; but one Scottish minister was permitted in 
each presidency. Native Christians were obliged to drag 
the cars of idols and perform impious forced labor. Mili- 
tary honors were paid to the images and sacred temples of 
the Hindoos ; the company administered the revenues of 
the pagodas. The burning of widows was permitted as 
late as 1829. Christianity did not humiliate itself, it 
merely withdrew from sight. Up to 1830, Christians born 
in India were excluded, in the presidency of Madras, from 
all public offices, from the bar, the bench, the army ; their 
personal status was not even defined. The East under- 
stands neither tolerance nor the separation of Church and 
State j how should the sovereign renounce the vast wealth 
of the churches ? Still, when the company ceased to be 
free and became the mere agent of parliament, England 
thought to withdraw from the administration of the 
churches. In 1846, the India Council essayed to transfer 
to trustees the vast possessions that had been for genera- 
tions the patrimony of sects. This act of relinquishment 
was not understood, it was looked upon as an abdication 
or the part of the sovereign. Lands were offered to the 



312 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



temple of Juggernaut, which was already in receipt of a 
large income. The native Catholics were emancipated. 
These reforms caused great commotion throughout the 
peninsula ; the natives thought that their religion was in 
jeopardy, and these apprehensions were not without their 
share in the great revolt of 1857. How many prisoners, on 
the point of being executed, offered to become converted, 
and were seized with consternation on finding that the 
offer could not save thenj ! To semi-barbarous races there 
is nothing repugnant in forced conversion ; might always 
seems to them the best sanction of right. Hence Moham- 
medanism alone makes slow progress in India, for it is a 
militant and conquering religion ; it is not triumphant at 
this present moment, but it has vague dreams of fresh 
triumphs. It arouses a race enervated and benumbed by 
Buddhism and offended by Christianity. The State, holding 
itself more and more aloof from sects, considers itself 
obliged to moderate the blundering zeal of missionaries, 
and has entrenched itself in a sort of religious nihilism. 
It does not claim the right of keeping the consciences of 
men ; the Mohammedan faith, sustained by glorious 
remembrances and hopes, profits .by this inertia to propia- 
gate itself. It has a vitality, an energy, that are wanting 
in the old religion. The Mohammedan world is not 
broken up into castes, and the Koran is more dangerous 
than the Vedas. The Bible is a dead letter by the side 
of these sacred books. The natives who abandon their 
ancient religion and accept civilization, become deists, 
free-thinkers. 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 313 

Never has there been domination more material than 
that of the English race in India 3 moral force, at least 
that which springs from religious doctrines, has had no 
share in it, so to sjoeak. The Englishman does not even 
take the trouble to argue with the natives, he does not 
reveal to them his own hidden life, he does not aim at 
converting them, he rules them. Surrounded by hypocriti- 
cal and lying races, he never lies ; but this very virtue 
seems to them doubtless only one of the forms of supreme 
contempt. The native is not much nearer to him, morally 
speaking, than the tiger or the leopard that he hunts in 
the jungle. The Scotch, Irish, or English soldier, come 
of a superior race, scorns to touch anything but his arms ; 
the kitchen and all his menial wants are attended to 
by Coolies. The officer has but one object : to live long 
enough to return to England on a pension. His health 
is looked after ; if he begins to suffer from the climate, 
he is sent to the hills for a change of air. A handful of 
strangers rules two hundred thousand soldiers, who rule 
two hundred million men. There is a sort of rude equity 
in the stranger, that enables him to conduct the adminis- 
tration for the most diverse races. Men who, in their own 
country, are so timid, so concerned about public opinion, 
who discuss incessantly the nicest shades of political justice, 
who can make themselves humble with the humble, who 
have a sort of morbid respect for individual rights, find 
themselves all at once omnipotent, judges, generals, law- 
givers, sovereigns. There is something monotonous, rigid, 
contracted about the English race, and yet this race finds 
14 



314 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



itself mixed up in the most diversified dramas, with the 
most dissimilar actors. It suffers itself to be led on by its 
courage and also by a sort of sovereign contempt that suc- 
ceeds in taking in the place of knowledge and equity. It 
is just as ready to treat with the subtlest representatives of 
the most ancient religions as with the most savage chief- 
tains of rude tribes. In her work of colonization, England 
casts aside all her parliamentary notions and constitutional 
prejudices; she does not hold that the rules by whicli 
she is governed can be applied else^where to advantage ; 
but she remains true to her great economic principles, and 
in so doing perhaps she guarantees most effectually the 
permanence 6f her power. She has given up the old 
colonial idea, such as France and Spain long adhered to; 
she does not look upon government as a means of extract- 
ing all the wealth possible from the colonies to squander it 
in the mother country. She is satisfied with having her 
agents remunerated generously enough to induce them to 
quit their country for awhile ; she demands from her 
distant possessions no tribute, no ransoms, no perpetual 
sacrifices. She administers the finances according to the 
wisest rules that she can discover, and does not aim at 
crushing the people with taxes ; she seeks out the best 
taxes, those which operate least as a restraint upon the 
production and circulation of wealth. In a word, she has 
invented a new colonial ideal, that consists in considering 
commerce and not the payment of tribute as the natural 
bond of union between a colony and the mother country. 
The more this commerce prospers, the more the mother 



THE COLONIAL POLLCY. 315 

country will become enriched, and the prosperity of this 
commerce is dependent upon the prosperity of the colony. 

It has been said that if England were expelled from 
India, she would leave no trace of her conquest except a 
few broken bottles. They who say so forget the network 
of railways that unite the different parts of the peninsula ; 
above all, they overlook the remembrance of the longest 
peace that the East has ever known, the benefits of estab- 
lished order among peoples long condemned to the most 
cruel oppression, to incessant war, to misery and hunger. 
The reformers who obtained the repeal of the Corn Laws 
and Navigation Laws, who conferred upon England the 
benefit of commercial liberty, have not only saved their 
country from sanguinary revolutions ; they have, — with- 
out knowing it and almost without wishing it, — assured for 
an indefinite time to come the commercial supremacy of 
England. People have discovered that the best way of 
keeping men in obedience is not to treat them as enemies. 
Commerce is a purer school of politics than diplomacy is j 
credit is based upon the observance of agreements, and 
the credit of England has become her real strength. 

The East, given over to usury for centuries, is becom- 
ing acquainted with better rates of interest ; all along the 
shores and in the islands of the New Mediterranean 
called the Pacific Ocean, civilized peoples are essaying 
their powers in conflicts of a new order ; the future is no 
longer to the one that shall be most formidable, most 
unrelenting, but to the one that shall inspire the most con- 
fidence. In this conquest of the world by credit and com- 



3i6 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



merce, England will for a long time have immense advan- 
tages. She is at once daring and prudent, active, adventur- 
ous ; the world of Asia is large enough for her and also 
for the United States and for Russia, her only formidable 
rivals. The United States approach Asia from the sea ; 
Russia, from all quarters. The most direct route from 
England is barred by the Isthmus of Suez. This strip of 
land incommodes her ; it is not enough for her to have 
Gibraltar and Malta, she must have a foothold in Egypt. 
At least she can not suffer any other European power to 
establish its supremacy over that country, but wishes to 
have it as a sort of vassal. 

There was a time when France might have thought of 
conquering Egypt ; her present condition will not permit 
her to entertain such vast designs. England feels reas- 
sured ; the Suez canal was constructed with French 
money, but, now that the work is accomplished, others 
will profit by it. England is overrunning Egypt with her 
new weapons, with her banks, her credit, her capital ; she 
is acquiring a controlling position. She has even invaded 
the mountains of Abyssinia to punish a monarch who had 
dared to defy her. Her travellers penetrate to the very 
heart of Africa and cross it in every direction. 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 317 



IV. 



Three immense continents remain open to English 
ambition : Asia, Australia, Africa ; England is more 
tempted to curtail than to extend her conquests in these 
countries. She feels at times startled, as it were, at her 
own greatness, at the efforts she imposes upon herself. 
She makes too much of a figure in the world at large and 
perhaps too little of a figure in Europe, and this contrast 
keeps fretting her. Her activity loses heart. Has she 
not to know everything, be informed about everything, 
watch Central Asia, keep track of Russia there, learn the 
secrets of the seraglio, hold the threads of a hundred 
political combinations, suppress insurrections at the 
ends of the earth, hasten to the aid to every Englishman 
who cries : Civis roinanus sum, learn all the languages, 
administer the justice of the Koran and the justice of the 
Gospel ? She exercises a sort of guardianship, the duties 
of which become day by day more overwhelming because 
they are day by day better understood. 

Respect for human life and property is the primary 
object of government ; human societies can secure this 
benefit by force alone, whether that force be called police 
or called army. The State in any given country has the in- 
controvertible right of suppressing whatever is undertaken 
against the rights of individuals ; and when a country is in 
such a wretched state of anarchy that human life ceases, so 



3i8 ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

to speak, to have any value, we can scarcely condemn the 
nation that seizes upon that country and restores peace. 
England has had, at all events, a clear understanding of 
the duties imposed by the patronage that she exercises 
over so many inferior races ; she protects reviving civili- 
zations and also civilizations in decay ; if her interference 
with so many different races and peoples be considered as 
injustice, it may be asserted that her greatness can not do 
without injustice, but lives by it, is nourished by it. The 
entire edifice of her power would fall to pieces, the moment 
she attempted to make a universal application of the prin- 
ciples of pure Christian morality ; she quiets her con- 
science with the recollection of what she has done for the 
liberation of the negro. She kept down the slave-trade, 
while praying for the success of the Southern Confederacy, 
of which slavery was the corner-stone. She has, as it 
were, two attendant genii ; the one prompting her to con- 
quest, rapine, covetousness, contempt for everything that 
is not English, inflexible severity towards the weak and 
the conquered ; the other inspiring her with respect for 
justice, with a certain love for humanity that has in it far 
more of religiousness than of tenderness, that springs not 
so much from compassion as from equity. 

Not by force alone, with an army of sixty thousand 
English troops, would England have succeeded in holding 
sway for more than a century over two hundred millions 
of natives. The Anglo Saxon race is an imperial race, 
born to command. It knows how to exercise every func- 
tion, adapt everywhere means to ends. It does not intro- 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



319 



diice into its dependencies the jDolitical and administrative 
habits of the mother country. The Lords who, at West- 
minster, restrict themselves to the narrow circle prescribed 
by the constitution, become, at Calcutta, governors, as it 
were, of India, administrative emperors, institutors of 
reform in every shape ; the government which, in Eng- 
land, keeps in the background as much as possible, doing 
only what is strictly necessary, and leaving all that it can 
to the initiative of the individual, becomes, in India, the 
supreme and universal motive power. We see in this 
great Asiatic conquest the type of a paternal government, 
representing not one party that has come into power, and 
that exercises an ephemeral and stubbornly disputed sway, 
but the continuous, uninterrupted force of administrative 
and social progress. The government of India has become 
the type of an administrative monarchy; politics, at least 
what we generally mean by this word, that is to say, par- 
liamentary contest, incessant opposition to the action of 
the State, the power of eloquence, the propaganda of 
human speech, have no place here. This great country is 
governed like a factory ; it is led on to the future by a 
despotism that is neither fanciful, nor personal, nor arbitrary, 
by an enlightened despotism that makes use of its power 
only to break down useless barriers, shake off the fetters 
that impede trade and the circulation of wealth. The 
colossal experiment that the European genius is now mak- 
ing in Asia, an experiment begun without method but now 
pursued according to rules that become surer and surer, 
has not yet borne fruit ; we can scarcely conjecture what 



320 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



will be the results, what will be the transformation of these 
numerous races armed, as though by ^god from on high, 
with the most perfect instruments of civilization, before 
they have fairly emerged from barbarism. Nothing in 
history is comparable to these metamorphoses, neither the 
conquests of Alexander, nor the more substantial conquests 
of Rome, nor the invasions of the Barbarians. Asia is too 
powerful a body to melt away at the touch of European 
civilization; its human myriads will not disappear like the 
few scattered tribes of Red-skins or Australians. But its 
religions will be shaken, its ideas will become modified, 
its races themselves will undergo charge. England plays 
at the present day the great role of disturber of the bar- 
barian world that was so long played by Rome ; she is 
reversing the Barbarian invasions ; she has made her way 
into a barbarian world, introducing her military organiza- 
tion, her social customs, her commercial usages, her reli- 
gion, her aristocratic hierarchy, everything that goes to the 
making up of her power and her ideal. 

The theory of paternal government, the king as defined 
by Bossuet and Fenelon and desired even by Voltaire, 
seems to the European states of to-day a chimera; utility 
comes more and more to be regarded as the excuse, the 
raisoji d'etre, of government. Fidelity to a race, to a 
family, to a person, to any one particular form of govern- 
ment, to a written and venerable charter, — all these ties 
are becoming relaxed. People dream of a State in which 
there shall be no more politics, in the present meaning 
of the term, no more parties, no more hostile camps 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



321 



inflamed with rival passions, but in which administration 
shall become the chief office of a government of reason, a 
protecting, peaceful, strong government, which, no longer 
occupied in its own defence, may devote itself exclusively 
to the solution of all the social problems. It matters not 
whether such a government be a monarchy or a republic. 
The king or the president can be only the highest wheel 
in a powerful administrative machine. Science, patient 
and mute labor, action, the spirit of innovation, statistics, 
hygiene will occupy, in these great administrative empires, 
the place now held by eloquence and parliamentary 
intrigue. We are not comparing, in this place, the two 
systems, the government of men by argument and the 
government of men by hierarchy ; but it is certainly curious 
that England should succeed in applying them both, that 
she should have urged them both, so to speak, to the 
pitch of perfection. At bottom, she is always true to her- 
self, whether on the banks of the Ganges or on the banks 
of the Thames. The English race is profoundly imbued 
with the sense and conviction of its right of patronage. In 
India, the Englishman patronizes whole races and peoples ; 
he drives them before him like human herds, defending 
them from their own dissensions. In England, the govern- 
ing, ruling class also exercises a right of patronage. The 
mandate* of the lord, of the member of the House of 

* I have preferred to translate this passage literally, instead of 
blunting its point by circumlocution. The meaning turns upon the 
word Dtandatc, which can be explained only by going back to the 
Roman Law. In that system, the person employing another to do a 
certain thing for him was called mandator : the agent was called man- 

14* 



322 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



Commons, has nothing in common with the imperative 
mandate of demagogic societies ; it has not the restricted 
character of the mandate given to an attorney ; it is a 
mission, not merely conferred by the chance of birth or by 
the chance of election, but imposed by fortune, by educa- 
tion, by all the accumulated forces that exalt a civilization. 
We always see two contending parties ; but the alterca 
tions of these parties are only the expression of the doubts, 
the hesitations of a conscience that is trying to find its way. 
We do not perceive the authority, because it is always 
preceded by persuasion ; but behind the tangled veil of 
parties there is a will, an inflexible, manifold, myriad- 
armed authority that carries with it the entire country. 
As long as England has this sturdy faith in herself, she 
will continue to grow in greatness, or at least she will 
know how to defend her greatness. She has almost noth- 
ing to fear from Europe ; she exaggerates the peril to be 
apprehended from Russia or the United States. Her 
real enemy is nearer at hand ; the entire edifice of her 
power is sustained by a few ideas that begin to be in jeop- 
ardy, and by — shall we add ?-^certain fictions. Now mod- 
ern democracy rejects all fictions, or whatever it takes to 

datm'ius ; the thing itself, the legal relation thus created, and the 
instructions, were all three called mandatiwi. In this particular pas- 
sage, the word mandate denotes instructions, and also the legal rela- 
tion, or power, itself. The point that the author wishes to bring out 
is simply this : that the electors in England have not the right to 
force any binding, imperative instructions upon their representatives 
in parliament ; the deputy is the inandatarius, but his mandatiwi is 
unrestricted and irrevocable, and can be terminated only by death or 
the dissolution of parliament. Tr. 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



323 



be fictions : the fiction of royalty, the fiction of hereditary 
aristocracy ; it is no longer willing to make any conces- 
sions to the past and its reminiscences ; it puts mankind 
on a war-footing, it abases whatever is exalted and exalts 
whatever is abased. It gives to numbers an active, impa- 
tient, jealous sovereignty ; it would gladly shatter all the 
political forms consecrated by the experience of even the 
most flourishing republics, to emancipate itself from all 
rule, from all restraint. There is no doubt but that the 
democratic spirit is making great progress in England, 
numbers are becoming, in their turn, a political power ; 
but, by a freak of fortune, the passions of the masses are 
not yet hostile to those powers that come of time, that 
proceed from the past, and that now occupy the political 
arena. The people is like the chorus weeping or rejoic- 
ing with the heroes of the play, echoing their words, and 
not dreaming of taking exclusive possession of the stage. 
The people still believes in its gods and its demi-gods j it 
is not egoistic, it suffers something to live by its side; 
it has need of some object of admiration, of adoration ; it 
forgets itself in the sight of this grand apotheosis of every- 
thing that it is accustomed to venerate, to love and to 
serve. It might adopt the motto of the Prince of Wales : 
Ich dien^ \ it serves assuredly not a man, a family, nor cer- 
tain men, certain families, but England, invisible, univer- 
sal ; it has faith in this England, it admires whatever adds 
anything to her power ; it has made her free by dint of 
obedience, great by dint of humility. Hitherto the Eng- 
lish aristocracy has succeeded in keeping alive these sen- 



324 



ENGLAND POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 



timents, in nourishing the popular imagination with visible 
and imaginary grandeur ; the word gentleman, which is no 
longer used in France except in a material sense, has 
preserved in England an ideal meaning, and here we have 
perhaps the secret of the astonishing permanence of Eng- 
lish unity. How shall that unity, now so profound, be 
one day threatened ? Will the aristocracy of money, that 
has begun to mingle with the aristocracy of birth and is 
doubtless to end by dethroning it, will this aristocracy be 
as able, as popular as the elder aristocracy ? We may 
doubt it. When the real sovereign is the richest man, when 
the old races have become the vassals of speculators, when 
those who give their lives are replaced by those who buy 
the lives of others, the English ideal will become dimmed 
and finally extinct. In this overpopulated isle there will 
be none but hirers and hirelings ; and the religion of the 
new era, socialism, will find here the greatest number of 
martyrs, of fanatics, and of executioners. Nowhere else 
will the levelers find so muoh to destroy. The higher the 
edifice shall have been erected, the greater will be the 
crash of its downfall. There is so much artifice, or rather 
so much art, in England's greatness as a power, that it can 
be kept up only by a sort of perpetual miracle of self- 
denial on the part of the governed classes, and of wisdom, 
toil, and clear-sightedness on the part of the governing. 
Let the latter get but a touch of the madness that Jupiter 
sends to those whom he wishes to ruin, take from the 
former their slowness, their patience, and catastrophe upon 
catastrophe will ensue. The English constitution is like a 



THE COLONIAL POLICY. 



325 



complicated machine, where we can not break a single 
part without stopping the whole. Everything is suspended 
by a few venerable opinions, twisted together like the 
strands of a cord ; let but a strand or two break, and the 
whole cord may give way and everything be dashed to 
pieces at once. 



THE END. 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

Publish the following Books, whicJi zvill be sent by mail, pre- 
paidy on receipt of price : 



T 



HE EDUCATION OF AMERICAN GIRLS. 



Edited by Anna C. Brackett, formerly Principal of the 
Normal School of St. Louis. 

CONTENTS : 
1, Introduction, Anna C. Brackett. 2. A Fair Chance, L. H. Stone. 3. The Other Side, 
Caroline H. Dall. 4. A Mother's Thought, Edna D. Cheney. 5. English and American 
Girls, Mary E. Beedy. 6. Mental Action and Physical Strength, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. 
7. Michigan University, Sarah Dix Hamlin. 8. Mt. Holyoke Seminary, Mary O. Nutting. 
9. Oberlin College, A. A. F. Johnston. 10. Vassar College, Dr. Alida C. Avery. 11. Anti- 
och College. 12. Review of " Sex in Education." 

i2mo, cloth, $1.75. 

q^HE Greeks of to-day. 

By the Hon. Charles K. Tuckerman, late Minister of 
the United States at Athens. i2mo, cloth extra, $1.50. 

Mr. Tuckerman has had exceptional opportunities for becoming acquainted with 
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clear and vivid studies that convey to the reader information of the greatest value and 
interest. 

"We know of no book which so combines freshness and fulness of information."— 
N. Y. Nation. 

"The chapters on the Parthenon and its ruins shows that Mr. Tuckerman has not only 
the eye of a critic, but of an artist." — Christian Register, Boston. 

TVr OTES ON ENGLAND AND ITALY. 

"^ By Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, (wife of the Novelist). 

Third edition, i2mo, cloth, $2 ; half calf, $4. 

Of Mrs. Hawthorne's charming "Notes on England and Italy," both English and 
American critics have said much in praise. We quote specimens : — 

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-^ The Fall of England, 1875-1925. Reminiscences of a 
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Destruction of the British Fleet. Occupation of London. 

German Victory at Dorking. Fall of the British Empire. 

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TTAMPTON AND- ITS STUDENTS. By Two of i 
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VII. 

PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF CHARLES KNIGHT, j 
Publisher, Author and Leader in the Work of Popular Edu-1 
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Entertaining Knowledge" and "The Popnlar History of England." Revised ' 
and Abridged from the English Edition. Large i2mo, about 450 pp. With 
Portrait. 

The life of a man like Chades Knight, who may be said to have founded that 
system of Popular Education which brings the highest literature of the language 
within the reach of the lowest of the people, should possess a special interest for 
readers in a nation at the basis of whose institutions such a system must lie 
The publication of the "Penny Encyclopcedia " and "The Library of Useful 
Knowledge " completely revolutionized the whole method of teaching the Eng- 
lish people. Mr. Knight was, perhaps, the first to perceive that text-books 
alone could not supply all that was necessary to the development of popular in 
telligence. What was required to supplement the text-books had hitherto 
been accessible only to the wealthier classes, but in the admirable series of works 
planned by Mr. Knight, the clearest scientific information on the one hand, and 
on the other a knowledge of the higher literature, were placed within the reach 
of every member of the poorer and working classes. 

Apart from this work, Mr. Knight's life was interesting from his association 
dunng a m6st important half century with nearly all classes of the leading and 
thinking men of Great Britain. The story of his labors is simply and dramat- 
ically told in his own language, which has been left unchanged as far as was 
consistent with the slight abridgement that it has been considered advisable to 
make from the more voluminous English edition. /Ty ^ -kJl^ 



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